Why Mizzou football assistant Casey Woods had to hitchhike to the KC suburbs
After spending the previous two years in Alabama, newly hired Missouri tight ends coach Casey Woods found himself in unfamiliar conditions:
A blizzard on I-70.
Woods was traveling in January to the Kansas City area to see Mizzou tight end and Blue Springs High graduate Daniel Parker Jr., who was laid up in the hospital with an eye infection. What started as a toothache worsened and spread to his eye, leaving some doubt whether Parker would be able to play football again.
It got the point that Woods decided he needed to visit his tight end. This would also be the first time the two would meet, as Woods had just recently been hired by MU coach Eliah Drinkwitz.
“I told him I was going to be there,” Woods said on a video call Wednesday. “There was a lot of uncertainty at that time, specifically for him. Every time there was supposed to be (good) news, there was more bad news.”
Woods said he was most of the way to KC when disaster struck. He was a few miles outside of Odessa when the day’s snowfall became an outright blizzard. The car in front of him stopped suddenly, and Woods was forced to hit the brakes for a “faster stop than I wanted it to be.”
“I looked in my rearview mirror and I couldn’t see anything — it was white out,” Woods said. “I immediately thought, ‘Oh (no).’”
While Woods claims it “could’ve been a lot worse,” he was hit by an 18-wheeler. Woods, in turn, hit the car in front of him until his car ended up on the side of the highway.
Once he came to a stop, he looked up and realized oncoming traffic was aimed right at him.
“I jumped out of the car real quick because I didn’t want to get hit when I was still in the car,” Woods said. “Everything was still together and all that. By that time, traffic had slowed down and realized what was going on.”
After dealing with a state trooper, the tow truck finally arrived and drove Woods the final few miles to Odessa. Woods said he remembered texting Drinkwitz a photo of his busted rental car. Fortunately, Woods was planning to fly out of KC to Nashville for a coaches’ convention the next day, so no harm was done to his personal vehicle.
Once Woods got to Odessa, he went into a gas station and said he’d give anyone $100 if they drove him to Oak Grove. Luckily, “the ol’ boy at the cash register” said he was getting off his shift in 15 minutes and took Woods up on the offer.
Even better, it turned out, the cashier was going toward Blue Springs, so he drove Woods all the way there instead of just to Oak Grove. By then, Woods’ former college roommate, Brad Cottam, had arrived to pick him up and drive him the rest of the way to see Parker at the hospital. Woods was also crashing Cottam’s house for the night, since Cottam was a former third-round pick of the Chiefs who had settled in KC.
“I was blessed,” Woods said. “I had a little bit of whiplash, but it wasn’t even my car. I had a lot better experience than Daniel Parker did, so I was happy to get in there and see him and see his mom.”
Woods said the cashier who drove him to Oak Grove turned down the $100 he’d offered, but Woods still filled up his gas tank and bought him a case of water.
The joke now, Woods said, is that his two years in Alabama sure didn’t help his driving skills in the snow very much. He’ll also never forget how Missouri sure seemed to get struck by snowstorms a lot once he’d moved from Birmingham to Columbia.
“I don’t know that in the moment it struck me ... as out of the ordinary that I got in the car accident and hitchhiked my way into Kansas City to a hospital to see (Parker),” Woods said. “I told him I was going to be there. It was important I was going to be there, for him to know that we cared about him.”