ACR Coach owners have offered apologies and more to New Hope High School baseball players and parents following a Tuesday night hitch in bus service.
New Hope High School baseball boosters booked one of the Starkville-based company’s charter buses to travel to Olive Branch for a North State 5A semifinal matchup with Lewisburg High School.
Co-owner Stephanie Futral said that during the Tuesday night game, ACR needed the bus to rescue another group of students stranded on the side of Interstate 40 about a half-hour away.
Futral said those students were bound for Washington, D.C., when their bus suffered a “minor mechanical issue.” After discovering the bus only needed a new air filter, Futral said the plan was to let the Washington kids continue on New Hope’s original bus and send the repaired bus back to Olive Branch, but the timing did not work out accordingly. Stephanie Futral said she and her husband, co-owner Randy Futral, kept the NHHS principal apprised of the situation as it progressed, and the bus en route was set to arrive at Olive Branch about 25 minutes after the baseball game concluded to get the team.
Parents, by then, had already left with the players in personal vehicles.
“We have some very upset parents, and we completely understand,” Stephanie Futral said. “The (New Hope) kids were not stranded because we had a bus on the way but they would have to wait.”
She said the company deeply apologizes for the inconvenience and has refunded the entire rate to New Hope baseball booster club. The company has also offered half price if the team takes another trip this week. She said ACR has also offered $200 scholarships to each New Hope baseball senior.
Futral added that the company has returned all of the personal belongings left on the New Hope bus.
NHHS principal Matt Smith said he and the Futrals did communicate regularly after the game ended about the situation.
“We were in discussions the whole way,” he said. “But it became abundantly clear they wouldn’t have a bus there in a timely manner.”
The team, he said, waited about 45 minutes after the game ended for a bus to arrive before he asked parents to start loading players themselves.
Smith said the school has used ACR many times before without incident, and he’s appreciated the Futrals’ efforts to make up for Tuesday. He said, though, he still doesn’t understand the company’s decision-making that night.
“The owners have done the best job they could after the fact to make it right,” Smith said. “That still doesn’t answer the question of how it happened in the first place.
The American Bus Association is standing by ACR’s decisions Tuesday night. Dan Ronan, the association’s senior director of communication, said ACR “showed good judgment” by responding to the situation on I-40 in a way that would have only caused minimum disruption to the New Hope players.
“The company did the right thing,” Ronan said.
He said ACR had been a good-standing member of the American Bus Association for several years.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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