MINNEAPOLIS -- Todd Bachman was a big volleyball fan. His support of the sport, spawned in his suburban Twin Cities community, brought him and his wife Barbara all the way to Beijing.
At the Olympics to cheer on the U.S. teams, Todd Bachman was stabbed to death at a popular Chinese tourist site Saturday while his wife Barbara Bachman was seriously injured in the attack.
Their daughter, Elisabeth Bachman McCutcheon, was with her parents but unhurt.
Elisabeth Bachman, who goes by her nickname "Wiz," was a volleyball star at Lakeville High School who went on be team captain three times and team MVP in 2000 at UCLA and earn a spot on the U.S. women's team that competed in the Athens Olympics in 2004. Wiz Bachman, 29, recently married Hugh McCutcheon, who coaches the U.S. men's team.
"I can only offer the deepest shock and sorrow we all feel here, because the Bachman family was always so close to our program," said Milan Mader, Wiz Bachman's coach at the school now known as Lakeville North High.
Even after their daughter moved on to higher competition in college and internationally, the Bachmans maintained their interest in the program at Lakeville, a fourth-ring suburb south of Minneapolis.
"They still came back to support her former high school teams," Mader said. "It was just a great, great couple supporting the programs and supporting the school."
Mader said the Bachmans had two daughters older than Wiz, though they played sports other than volleyball. He last saw the Bachmans in July and remarked in a phone interview Saturday about Wiz's eagerness to stop by the gym and help coach the high schoolers whenever she was in town.
"She was a clone copy of her parents," Mader said.
Todd Bachman was the fourth-generation chief executive officer of Bachman's, Inc., a family floral business founded in Minneapolis in 1885. The company operates 29 retail stores in Minnesota and has grown to include full-service gift and garden centers, landscaping and nursery divisions plus a 629-acre growing range near Lakeville that produces many of the plants, flowers and products sold at its stores. According to information provided by the company, Bachman's employs between 1,100 and 1,600 people -- depending on the season.
A news conference at Bachman's headquarters was scheduled Saturday afternoon.
According to a 2006 interview with the Star Tribune newspaper, Todd Bachman said the business did $81 million in revenue in the previous year. Despite the family's success in the industry and the company's familiarity to gardeners and flower buyers all around the Twin Cities area, the Bachmans were known as down-to-earth people.
"He always played low key," Mader said. "He never wanted to be above anybody. Their comments were always positive. It never appeared to me in all these years I've known him that he was above anybody else. I never got that kind of impression. They were great human beings."
Doug Bergman coached Wiz Bachman's summer club teams when she was in high school, and through all the travel and time in the gym became a close friend of the whole family. The Bergmans often visit the Bachman home for dinner, and the wives and kids usually bake cookies together around Christmas.
"They very, very giving," Bergman said. "They're just very friendly people."
The Bachmans followed their daughter's career all over the world, attending match after match in faraway places.
"Todd was ultimately kind. He was just so incredibly supportive as a father of an athlete. Some people can get a little worked up at sporting events, but he was just there in the stands waving his flag -- whether it was for Team USA, for UCLA or for Lakeville."
In China, the American volleyball players were devastated by the news. The women's team was told before its game against Japan.
"It was a reaction that I don't even have to describe," said Stacy Sykora, who roomed with Wiz Bachman in 2004. "You have to understand what Wiz Bachman is to USA Volleyball. She's probably the nicest person in the entire world, her and her family. Her family is like our family."
