Hundreds of students, faculty and staff members and local residents joined a battle of rallies, retreats and ultimately triumph as they fought to protect athletics buildings on a flooded Iowa campus.

After absorbing runoff from more than half a foot of rain, the Upper Iowa River rose quickly in the community of Decorah, reaching the 15½-foot mark by 5 p.m. Sunday, June 8, then rising to a record 18 feet by early the following morning.

Water flowed over a dike near Luther’s campus and then broke through a levee, swamping the college’s baseball, soccer and softball fields and jeopardizing the school’s Regents Center, which houses the college’s main sports arena and recreational facilities.

Volunteers gathered in the Regents Center’s parking lot, stacking sandbags in knee-deep water, but a rising tide Monday afternoon knocked that line of defense over. The group restacked those sandbags, then regrouped and constructed another barrier along the north and west walls of the Regents Center, even as water collected in that building’s lower-level racquetball courts and threatened other parts of the building.

Finally, the river crested, and the waters eventually began to recede. School officials, who said the sandbagging effort prevented much worse damage to the Regents Center, waited for flooding to retreat before assessing damage to the nearby fields, where waters reached at one point as high as the top of the soccer field’s goalposts. Football equipment in a storage room also sustained damage.

The impact of flooding was felt by other athletics programs around the state.

Iowa’s softball stadium, Pearl Field, and Francis X. Cretzmeyer Track also suffered damage as waters surged into the heart of the university’s Iowa City campus.

Only Pearl Field’s press box remained dry, as some of that facility lay under 6 feet of water.

Rising waters in downtown Cedar Rapids forced the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference from its office in the flooded Guaranty Bank building, while IIAC members Coe and Cornell College suffered power outages.

Some schools’ athletics facilities served as shelters for flood victims, including Wartburg, which made its recently built Wartburg-Waverly Sports and Fitness Center available for use by the Red Cross. Even Luther briefly housed residents of a nearby nursing home on higher ground at the college, while its volunteers battled back and forth against the waters in the low-lying areas of campus occupied by its athletics facilities.