The day sports stopped: Coaches, athletes recall start of the pandemic and the that followed
Crazy year
Sam Brand watched his players file onto the bus — 45 minutes to College Park and a chance to put an exclamation point on all the work they’d done together. Brand had spent a decade building Poly basketball into a titan, competitive on the national stage and dominant on the local. The nine seniors on his team had grown into leading men. Point guard Rahim Ali Jr. aimed to start in his fourth consecutive state title game. Eight more quarters, four more bus rides and their climb would be complete.
Then, Brand’s phone buzzed with a text.
The day that sports stopped began with trepidation for athletes and coaches at all levels of the Baltimore athletic scene. Gloom and dread, prompted by an inscrutable new opponent named COVID-19, seemed to deepen by the hour. The night before, they’d watched the mighty NBA halt its season after a positive test for Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert. Still, they had work to do — buses to board, bullpen sessions to throw, practices to plan, tournament games to win. You always push through; that’s what their lives in sports had taught them.
March 12, 2020, would be different. By supper time, all their plans — in some cases, careers they’d worked decades years to build — would be in ashes.
A year later, we’re playing games again, but that doomed Thursday has lost none of its eerie resonance for the athletes and coaches who lived through it. Some are back on their fields and courts. Others are not.
‘It’s totally weird’
At Loyola Maryland, Bridget Ballard and her lacrosse teammates had
traded in gallows humor regarding the pandemic ever since the Ivy League shut down spring sports in February. But they were off to a splendid start, 5-0 and ranked No. 3 in the country.
“This was by far the closest team I’d ever been a part of,” said Ballard, whose previous three years at Loyola were marred by injuries. “From seniors to freshmen, you couldn’t tell any difference between the classes. I think that’s one reason we were so good on the field, because we were so strong off it. Those
are the girls who will be my best friends forever.”
On Thursday morning, Loyola coach Jen Adams bumped up a scheduled film session for the team’s next game on Saturday. Why? The players waited nervously outside their meeting room, urging one another not to freak out unless they saw athletic director Donna Woodruff. As soon as the words escaped their lips, she appeared. Then they saw Adams, tears rimming her eyes.
“Oh crap,” Ballard thought, knowing the grim news that would follow. Before Woodruff made her formal announcement that the Patriot League had canceled its spring season, the players were sobbing loudly enough that specific words hardly registered. Ballard buried her face in the shoulder of her best friend, Holly Lloyd.
As they filed out in a daze, they saw the men’s team pass in the hall, about to receive the same news. Players from both teams hung out for hours that night — an informal wake. Instead of playing their scheduled game on Saturday, the women scrimmaged each other and gathered with their families for a party at a teammate’s Baltimore home. Adams decorated the locker room as if it was Senior Day, and they goofed around on the field as if nothing had been lost.
Ballard had the option to return for a fifth season in 2020-2021, something three of her closest classmates did. After three months of agonizing, she decided her body was too broken down.
She still speaks with her old teammates every day from her home in Chatham, New Jersey, where she’s working. She hopes pandemic restrictions will ease enough for her to travel to a game later in the season.
“It’s totally weird, bittersweet really,” she said, reflecting on the morning when her lacrosse career ended with an abrupt announcement in a meeting room. “I was extremely grateful to have ended it with the team that I did. But it was my entire life; I started playing in fourth grade and never looked back.”
‘It hurt me’
In College Park, meanwhile, two nationally ranked basketball teams nurtured grand ambitions for the month ahead.
Four days earlier, the Maryland men had closed their regular season with a resounding home victory over Michigan. They were preparing for a noon practice at the Xfinity Center ahead of a planned flight to Indianapolis for the Big Ten Tournament. Instead, coach Mark Turgeon pulled them into the locker room and told them the season was over.
“Everything just like, stopped,” remembered Jalen Smith, the Terps’ second-leading scorer. “I guess you could say it was a good thing that we won the conference championship in that last game and basically partied with the whole arena.”
Smith, who now plays for the Phoenix Suns, knew he was probably headed for the NBA, but he coveted a March Madness run. “It hurt me,” he said. “I was like, ‘I did all that to improve myself and help my team get into the position to win.’ And then it came to an abrupt end. It hurt. We had a close bond. Everybody was pretty much everybody’s best friend.”
Smith’s parents came from Baltimore to help him pack up his room. He said his goodbyes. Just like that, he was no longer a college basketball player.
“There’s nothing you can compare it to, having your whole season cut off like that,” he said. “That’s the first time it’s ever happened.”
The Maryland women had already won their
Big Ten Tournament and looked forward to a No. 1 seed as they gathered for Thursday practice. With the virus looming, they had pledged to soak up every moment.
“We realized,” said Faith Masonius, a freshman forward on last year’s team. “I remember that practice like it was yesterday. Our assistant athletic director came down and pulled coach [Brenda Frese] out.”
As the moments dragged on, Masonius thought, “Let’s stay on the court as long as we possibly can, because this is our last one.” Frese reappeared and moved everyone to the team lounge for the announcement no one wanted to hear. Masonius’ heart broke as she watched grief wash over the team’s four seniors.
The players didn’t know when they would see each other again, so they retreated to their apartments for a last movie night as a team. Masonius stuffed two big travel bags and drove home to New Jersey a few days later, unsure when she’d play her next game.
Though she and the Terps are rolling again this year, that group never finished its story.
“We knew we were going far,” Masonius said. “We knew as a team we didn’t yet prove what we could do. It was a shame we didn’t get to show everybody else.”
The forest fire spread rapidly through college basketball. The Big East called off its men’s tournament at halftime of a quarterfinal game. In Norfolk, Virginia, Morgan
State beat Delaware State in the quarterfinal round of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference women’s tournament. Moments later, the Bears learned they were the last team to complete a game before the NCAA cut the cord on all its spring and winter championships.
‘We just looked at each other dumbfounded’
The Orioles had yet to fly home from Sarasota, Florida for the start of their season, but center fielder Cedric Mullins and his teammates were deep into the rituals of spring — sharpening their batting eyes, loosening their arms, scraping for precious roster spots.
“I was on the bus, heading to an away game. We got two blocks down the road and the bus literally turned around,” Mullins said, recalling that Thursday. “They told us everything was shut down. … We just looked at each other dumbfounded.”
Players first assumed they’d be back for workouts in a few days, but the uncertainty only deepened. With access to the team’s facility shut off, Mullins went to the grocery to stock up on food for the house he shared with four teammates. The shelves were cleaned out of meat, eggs, bread and toilet paper.
Players practiced in small groups at Sarasota parks and high schools. Some went to the beach just to pass the time.
Others retreated to their hometowns.
“I got home March
15, and Ohio bars and restaurants were shut down. It was completely different from Florida,” minor league pitcher Zac Lowther said. “My wife just started working. I had nothing to do. It was still cold up there, so I was trying to train as well as I can and replicate spring training, but you can’t do that in the cold. It was weird, just being home that whole time. That was the first spring, summer I have been doing nothing for, I don’t know, since I was 12.”
Baseball is different from its peer sports because so many players toil primarily in the minor leagues. If they miss a window to make the major league club, it might never reopen. Hence the anxiety that afflicted so many players as COVID-19 wiped out minor league seasons and upended the entire structure.
Mullins stood on steadier ground than many, but his job with the Orioles was not assured, and he wondered if all his winter preparations, designed to erase a dreadful 2019 season, would go for naught.
“I know guys felt like a year was going by and they wouldn’t have anything to show for it,” he said. “I’m positive it changed the courses of a lot of careers. … I wanted to come back and show that the stuff I did had helped me improve significantly. With the season shutting down and not knowing whether there was going to be a season at all, there was some worry there.”
He ultimately played well in 48 games for the Orioles, but that outcome felt far from certain on March 12.
‘There’s a void that was left’
Back at Poly, Brand kept one eye on the bad news erupting all around the sporting landscape, but he held out hope as he shepherded his team from locker room to bus. The Engineers only needed another 48 hours to finish what they’d started.
Then, the text came from athletic director Phil Thompson; there would be no state semifinal.
“At that point, I think our guys and myself were thinking that maybe in a couple weeks, we’d be back,” Brand recalled. “I don’t think anyone really realized the gravity of what was happening.”
Back in the locker room, he told his players to remain focused, because they could play any day.
Brand hasn’t been back on the court at Poly since. The program he and a band of volunteer coaches built into a three-time state champion lies dormant. Those nine seniors, whom he saw six days a week, have never gathered to celebrate what they achieved. A glorious run ended in an ellipsis.
“To see our counterparts in the MIAA playing games when our young people haven’t been addressed by leadership, it has been a difficult pill to swallow,” Brand said. “The narrative that a young person going to a public school is going to feel the brunt of a bad situation has been confirmed through this pandemic. It’s very disappointing.”
He helped the 2020 seniors find spots in college programs and at prep schools. But he can’t buy them jackets or rings to commemorate the greatest season in school history. He’s not sure if it would even make sense to schedule a party at this point.
“I don’t know how to go about it,” he said. “In terms of even our relationships, there’s a void that was left. It’s real. You can feel it. The love is not lost, but guys feel incomplete about what happened. I wish I could tell you everyone gained perspective, but it’s been a difficult thing to address.”