Outside of making the usual preparations for his team’s return to the basketball court this winter, life has vastly changed from what it was at the beginning of 2024 for South Kitsap boys basketball coach Anthony Lewis.

His left arm – his trusty guide arm on the court – is now stabilized by metal rods, screws and plates running between his shoulder and elbow. And off the court, drives across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge he had once been so eager to make to help at-risk youth had come to an end less than a week after he started.

But to have life at all, let alone be set to return to coaching less than a year after he was shot at random on Interstate 5, is a blessing the coach and high school paraeducator is continuing to make sense of. “There’s just a bunch of small variables that happened throughout that made it so I’m still able to be here today,” Lewis said. “I’m doing everything today that I was before the accident.”

Lewis had just completed his second day on the job, an exhausting 10-hour shift working with at-risk youth at a halfway house in Kent that ended in the earliest hours of Feb. 25. He remembers blending in with the usual late-night traffic headed westbound on I-5 in the Fife area, a car making what appeared to be a routine pass in the lane to his left.

It was when that same car began to slow down and match Lewis’ speed that he suspected something out of the ordinary, and it was only when the mystery car’s window rolled down that he could even begin to comprehend the worst.

That’s when the bullets began to fly. “I felt the first bullet hit my arm, an insane pain, and that was just followed by rapid glass breaking and things like that,” he said. “It was all fast and random. In my head, I was just trying to plan on how I was going to get help.”

Lewis spotted a gas station by an off-ramp, but was unable to navigate under the excruciating pain, so he ended up crashing his car in a ditch just south of the nearby overpass. The car caught some air, he remembered, but came to a complete stop. “I might have even put my car in park,” he said.

After a quick search for his phone was unsuccessful, Lewis exited the vehicle in a desperate attempt to flag somebody, anybody, down. Barely clinging to consciousness and unaware of any incoming help, he said a woman who had seen the shooting and accident pulled over and rushed to Lewis’ aid while calling 911.

It’s the moment that he says kept him from giving in to the pain. “By the time she got to me, I was on the verge of just, how do I say this, I was debating whether or not I should just go to sleep on the side of I-5 and let fate take control,” he said.

Emergency medical responders transported the coach to Tacoma General Hospital, where he received treatment for a shattered humerus in his left arm and two more “in-and-out” gunshot wounds in his right forearm and left thigh. Lewis was released from the hospital Feb. 29.

The shooting may have represented some of the worst of what Washington’s growing crime problem has to offer, but emerging too was an overwhelming response from a South Kitsap community ready to help. Over $66,000 was raised on a GoFundMe page dedicated to helping with medical and living expenses during his recovery, and fundraisers throughout Kitsap County brought in additional aid.

His gratitude is immeasurable. “It just showed how much I was appreciated here, and it helped me kind of gear my focus back towards basketball. It was incredible and overwhelming to see how much myself and my work was appreciated in this community.”

Lewis plans to continue showing his appreciation both as a coach and in his new role at the high school working in an in-school suspension program. He is also studying to get his master’s degree in school counseling, his story of survival providing new connections to youth.

South Kitsap will take the floor for the first time this season at home Nov. 30, and he can’t help but feel like a player again and the butterflies that come with it. He said: “I love coaching, and I love coaching these kids, so once I get my mind kind of thinking about that, it’ll be pretty easy to get back into it.”