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Thousands show up at Lely High School to honor the life of Ereck Plancher Watch »

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Like every other Lely High student in the 2007 senior class, Ereck Plancher was asked to provide a quote to run with his picture in the school yearbook.

Here’s what he wrote:

“An elder Plancher once told me, ‘Live each day like it’s your last, because the next day is not guaranteed.’”

Plancher died less than an hour after he collapsed March 18 following an offseason football workout. The University of Central Florida wide receiver was in Orlando with his teammates preparing for his redshirt freshman season.

He lived 19 years, three months and five days.

Seemingly, every second mattered.

Ken Fairbanks, the Lely principal, estimated there were 3,000 mourners inside the school Saturday, when Plancher’s alma mater hosted his memorial service.

The first 1,300 to arrive jammed inside the school’s 1,100-seat auditorium. The next 1,000 flowed into the cafeteria. Seven classrooms were opened as the masses kept coming; Lely packed those, too.

“I always said he was a pretty good football player,” Paul Ruby, Lely’s athletic director, said. “But he was a great person. I think it’s evident what kind of impact he made. He’s one of the finest people to ever come through these gates.”

Ruby watched the building fill.

Everyone who didn’t get into the auditorium, where the two-hour service was held, watched the events live on projector screens in the other areas.

It wasn’t a pretty picture.

The ceremony was an emotional, tear-filled roller-coaster from the moment it got under way. From the moment Plancher’s pallbearers followed an honor guard into the auditorium and placed the casket at the front of the room.

Even before.

Four boxes of Kleenex sat on a pair of tables in the gym lobby, near the main entrance. With the service 30 minutes away, three were empty.

Blown-up pictures of Plancher dotted the wall. A collage of photographs, press clippings and signatures rested between two remembrance books.

“Seeing is believing,” said University of Wisconsin linebacker Culmer St. Jean, a former teammate of Plancher’s on the Lely football team. “I was still in doubt.”

“I still can’t believe it’s true,” Jude Paul, another former teammate, said, as he waited to enter the auditorium.

Eleven days had passed since Plancher dropped to the ground outside UCF’s football facility.

Eleven days since the mystery began.

Those who knew Plancher at Lely say he was the hardest worker on the team. They can’t figure how a “routine” workout at UCF could befall him.

They’re not alone.

An autopsy was performed on Plancher the day after he died. It failed to render a cause of death, so further tests are being done.

“I think everybody needs to know what caused this,” Lely football coach Steve Pricer said. “We may never know, but we hope medicine provides us with an answer.”

That answer might come later. What has never been doubted is the way Plancher lived his life and the legacy he left in the Lely community.

Plancher has been described by peers -- even mentors -- as a leader. As the best big brother Edwin Plancher could have. As a Christian.

Most of the speakers Saturday provided a constant message to the grieving crowd. They said that Plancher had crossed the ultimate goal line. They said he had reached the only destination that ever really mattered to him.

Former Lely football coach Chris Metzger, who took a job in North Carolina following Plancher’s senior season, held a Bible over his head.

“This,” he said, “was Ereck’s playbook.”

The crowd applauded.

“We’re all gonna shed tears,” Metzger went on to say. “Let them be tears of joy.”

Most weren’t. Not yet.

Led by UCF coach George O’Leary, Plancher’s college teammates -- about 80 of them -- flowed out of three charter buses a half-hour before the service. Wearing matching black sweat suits, they filled six rows of seats in the front-right corner of the auditorium.

They must have known the folks in Plancher’s hometown would be emotional. But you have to wonder if they were prepared for what they saw.

And what they heard.

Plancher was born in Naples, but his family is of Haitian descent. Many of those on hand, in the auditorium or otherwise, mourned the Haitian way.

They wailed. They sobbed. They let everything pour out.

A woman in her late 40s fainted late in the service. Emergency services personnel carried her to the hallways, where they revived her.

The casket bore a Haitian flag.

“Haitians do not grieve like Americans,” said Wilson Plancher, Ereck’s uncle. “The love, the passion. It’s so strong.”

The passion was there when the Rev. Abanes Joseph, from Independent Haitian Church of God, led the opening prayer.

The passion was there when Fairbanks, one of the morning’s first speakers, presented 10-year-old Edwin his brother’s white No. 5 jersey and hugged his neck.

The worst arrived later.

The passion exploded when mourners watched a 10-minute slideshow, an emptying of the family’s photo album that covered Plancher’s life chronologically.

The slides came in series. Every new series showed Plancher at a different stage in his life -- he went from momma’s boy to Manatee Middle School honor student; from lady’s man (with girlfriend Noelle Nuzzi) to scholarship football player.

Moody music played in the darkened room. The emotion was unbridled, ripping out of Plancher’s fans as his smiles filled the projector screen.

One other note about the gathering: Its diversity.

This wasn’t a Haitian service. Or a black service. It was a Lely service.

A melting pot.

“That’s what makes this place so special,” Metzger said of Plancher’s alma mater. “There is no color.”

The spirit of the fallen star isn’t going anywhere, Lely officials say. The school will use Plancher’s legacy to inspire everyone who carries a book through these hallways or throws a block for his teammate on Friday nights in the fall.

For starters, Lely will award $500 in scholarship money to two seniors -- one male, one female -- in Plancher’s name for as long as there’s money in the fund.

“As long as I’m breathing,” O’Leary promised the crowd, and he’s already made a $4,000 contribution out of his own pocket.

And the football program, too, will honor Plancher. But not by retiring his number.

When the school’s coaches huddled last week to discuss the matter, they decided it best to keep No. 5 alive. One player, one special player, will wear it every season.

“That will be a very special number,” Pricer said. “The player to wear it will be chosen by the team.”

It will be a player, Pricer said, who best embodies the team concept. A player who gives more to the program than he gets from it. A player who doesn’t know what it means to take a play off. A player who lives each day like it’s his last.

A player, a person, like Ereck Plancher.