Bill Haber / AP

Tulane University employees Bill Russell, front, and David Dean paddle a canoe through the uptown section of New Orleans earlier this week.

updated 4:20 p.m. ET Sept. 6, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - Tulane athletic teams displaced from their New Orleans campus by Hurricane Katrina will be based this fall at five different universities.

The Green Wave student-athletes will live and attend classes at schools in Texas and Louisiana. The teams will stay together and play under the Tulane banner.

“Our community needs hope,” athletic director Rick Dickson said Tuesday. “Our student-athletes represent hope for them. They will carry the torch and be the face, and display the name of Tulane University and the New Orleans community until we are able to come home and do that on our own campus.”

Still, Dickson said the initial objective was to provide education, housing and meals to 243 athletes.

“Then, we’ll put the logistics of the athletic piece together next,” he said.

Tulane’s football team, which has been working out at SMU in Dallas, is moving later this week to Louisiana Tech in Ruston, about 230 miles north of New Orleans. The players will enroll in classes there that begin next week.

The men’s basketball team, along with the volleyball, swimming and diving and women’s soccer teams, will be at Texas A&M. The women’s basketball team and the baseball team will go to Texas Tech. Rice will host the tennis teams, and SMU will be the temporary home for the golf teams.

“We wanted to do what we could to help,” Texas A&M athletic director Bill Byrne told Dickson during a conference call Tuesday. “We’ll treat your athletes just like they were our own.”

Byrne, Rice athletic director Bobby May and Texas Tech AD Gerald Myers said their schools were prepared to host the teams as long as needed. They also could accommodate Tulane teams playing home games on their campuses, the three said during the call.

Most of the Tulane athletes would be enrolled at the schools Tuesday or Wednesday, Dickson said.

The only Tulane team that won’t take part in its scheduled season this fall is cross country. Men’s and women’s track don’t compete until the spring semester.

Tulane’s season-opening football game at Southern Mississippi, which also was affected by the storm, was postponed until after Thanksgiving.

The Green Wave’s first game is Sept. 17, a home game against Mississippi State that was supposed to be played in the Superdome. Dickson said he wasn’t sure where the game would be played.

“Our preference is to first identify a home-away-from-home venue for our football team,” Dickson said. “The possibilities, there are more than a handful right now. We haven’t weighed in on any of them at this point, and we haven’t ruled any of them out.”

Among the possibilities are playing on the Louisiana Tech campus or at Independence Stadium in Shreveport, La. Louisiana Tech and Tulane share three common home dates, all in October.

“A number of schools and athletic directors have stepped up and gone above and beyond more than anything I have experienced,” Dickson said. “We will never be able to express the amount of appreciation we have.”

Tulane tight end Jerome Landry, whose home was flooded in hurricane-battered Jefferson Parish, was relieved to know he’ll still play in his home state. He hopes displaced residents who relocated to areas around Ruston will help Tulane feel at home.

“A lot of people evacuated up north,” Landry said. “Hopefully people that were forced to move up there will come out and support us.”

Tulane’s administration is set up in Houston, and athletic officials had considered that as a home base. But they were unable to find enough housing for the school’s athletes on local campuses and in the Houston area, which has been inundated by evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.

“In the end, this is probably the best scenario, to return students to as normal a campus setting and experience as we could,” Dickson said.

Dickson said most athletic facilities at Tulane were still flooded, including the main athletic building, football practice facility and a baseball stadium under construction. Only the road uniforms for football and women’s soccer, which played in a tournament at UAB over the weekend, were salvaged.

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