STILLWATER, Okla. -- Nearly a year later, the pain is still evident in Oklahoma State basketball players who lost teammates and friends in a plane crash.

TRAVEL PLANS

STILLWATER, Okla. (AP) -- Oklahoma State plans to use a 32-seat charter airplane for the remainder of the basketball season, university officials said Monday in discussing the upcoming anniversary of a plane crash that killed 10 men. The Cowboys already have used the plane twice, for trips to Iowa State and Texas Tech. It is owned by Great Plains Airlines in Tulsa. Harry Birdwell, university vice president, said the school's regents will be asked Friday to approve a bid from Great Plains for the rest of the season. He said it will cost about $100,000. The crash in Colorado that killed two players and eight other men associated with the program involved a 11-seat Beechcraft King Air 200, which went down in a field about 40 miles east of Denver on Jan. 27, 2001. It was one of three planes, paid for privately by backers of the program, that had been used to transport the team and support staff to Boulder, Colo., for a game. This season, the Cowboys have taken a commercial jet on one road trip and three times have flown charter-certified smaller planes. The school plans to use the 32-seat charter whenever it's available and otherwise will use the smaller planes.

Andre Williams says he doesn't break down and cry as he did many times in the weeks after the Jan. 27, 2001, crash in Colorado. But he thinks often of his roommate, Dan Lawson, and the other nine men killed.

"I just look back and see the good times I had," he said Monday. "You just look back and see all the good things and just let them outweigh the bad things."

There have been some bad things. For Williams, none was tougher than traveling to the crash site in August to take part in the university's dedication of a memorial to the victims. He was the only player who attended the ceremony in a field about 40 miles east of Denver.

"I just never pictured something like that happening," he said. "Then you get out there and see that there is really nothing out there -- just open land, no trees, no nothing. I don't know, I just felt they deserved more than that, that they shouldn't have went out like that. It was real hard, especially going out to where the plane actually hit.

"The closer I got to it, the heavier my heart felt. It was real hard, but it was something I needed to do."

In the days after the crash, coach Eddie Sutton said, he wondered whether the Cowboys would be able to finish the season. But they did finish, wound up winning 20 games and went to the NCAA tournament.

This year's team is 15-3 and ranked No. 11, although the Cowboys are reeling a bit after losing two of their last three by wide margins, to Kansas at home and on the road against Texas Tech, before beating Nebraska, 70-63, at home Wednesday night.

"We just played so poorly in (those) two games, and there's no way that this (the anniversary) won't be on everybody's mind," Sutton said. "I think it's going to be a little more difficult for our coaching staff to make sure we can get these guys back on track."

Monday's gathering of Sutton, Williams, Fredrik Jonzen and Victor Williams was the only time this week that coaches and players would answer questions about the crash.

"I think it's good we're doing this," Sutton said. "I think everybody needs to understand those guys will never be forgotten. They were a special group of people.

"Why it happened, nobody knows. Accidents do happen. I know sometimes it's easy to get bitter and say 'Why did it happen to us?' But sometimes we don't have control over situations like that."

	Those who died in last year's plane crash remain in the OSU players minds.

Victor Williams said he has wrestled with that question many times in the past year.

"I've just tried to take a spiritual approach to it, that those guys are in a better place than we are," he said.

In addition to Lawson, those killed in the crash were walk-on Nate Fleming, publicist Will Hancock, trainer Brian Luinstra, manager Jared Weiberg, director of basketball operations Pat Noyes, play-by-play announcer Bill Teegins, radio engineer Kendall Durfey, and pilots Denver Mills and Bjorn Fahlstrom.

The Cowboys play Colorado on Saturday, when there will be a moment of silence at halftime, but otherwise no public ceremonies are planned to commemorate the anniversary.

Victor Williams said the past week figured to be difficult because of the anniversary, but that the Cowboys need to find a way to focus on the games. Remembering their lost friends, he said, could help.

"Coming off two big losses," he said. "We just constantly remind each other, if those guys were still here they'd be pushing us and saying positive things so going into the next game we can do a better job.

"That's basically what we try to do, is focus on the positives that those guys gave us."