PITTSBURGH — One year after five players were shot in the worst act of random violence to strike a major college sports program, Duquesne University's basketball team is in a healing mode.

Three of the five shooting victims are playing, and a fourth should return next year. The Dukes are coming off a 4-0 exhibition tour in Canada over the Labor Day weekend. And there's more optimism than there's been in years surrounding a program that hasn't been to the NCAA tournament since 1977.

Before attending a chapel service held Monday on the one-year anniversary of the shootings, coach Ron Everhart found himself reflecting about the damage done — but also about the unexpected positives that have followed.

"The one thing that overwhelms you is it could have been so much worse," said Everhart, who had yet to coach a Dukes game when the shootings took place following a Black Student Union party.

Two junior college transfers, Sam Ashaolu (head wounds) and Stuard Baldonado (back, arm), were critically injured — Ashaolu was in grave danger for hours and Baldonado came perilously close to being paralyzed.

A pair of major college transfers, Shawn James (foot) and Kojo Mensah (arm, shoulder), also needed months to heal, and the 6-foot-10 James still has occasional pain caused by the breakup of scar tissue.

As the 45-year-old Everhart spent four days last week recovering from minor surgery in the same hospital where the players were taken after being shot, the memories from last Sept. 16 began racing back.

Everhart remembered the anxious hours spent in Ashaolu's and Baldonado's hospital rooms. The outpouring of support from other students and the college basketball world. The sense of worry that the team he was trying to build might not recover from this tragedy, even if the players did.

He also worried he had broken the trust with the parents whose sons he had promised to protect.

"But you know what? I don't think the guys are looking back on this as something that's been a horrific tragedy," he said.