TODAY: IMPACT ON UH
Unprecedented shutdown left UH teams scattered around the country to find their way home
A nearby television caught Gerrod Chadwell’s attention as he walked to the table at Texas Roadhouse.
On the TV was a report that the Jazz-Thunder game in Oklahoma City had been postponed, nothing unusual Chadwell thought, but enough to pique his interest as an Oklahoma native.
“You just don’t see that in an NBA game unless something is wrong with the arena or whatever the case may be,” said Chadwell, the University of Houston women’s golf coach.
At the table, the group gathered for a meal before the start of a tournament in Mesa, Ariz., as Chadwell began to scroll through his phone for updates.
The headlines read:
NBA suspends season.
Jazz player tests positive for the coronavirus.
“This is pretty serious,” Chadwell said.
It was only the beginning.
The next day — March 12, 2020 — other pro leagues began to suspend their seasons, and the NCAA canceled winter and spring sports.
One by one, college basketball tournaments were called off, culminating in the unprecedented decision to cancel the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments.
A pandemic had brought sports — and life as we’ve known it — to a standstill.
At the University of Houston, it set off a chain reaction as teams scattered across the country scrambled to find their way home.
By the time the news reached them, the UH women’s golf team was on the course for a practice round at Longbow Golf Club.
The men’s basketball team was on a bus, halfway to Fort Worth for the American Athletic Conference basketball tournament.
Five members of the men’s and women’s track and field teams were in Albuquerque, N.M., for the NCAA’s indoor championships.
A dozen softball players were in the indoor batting cages preparing for a trip to Norman, Okla.
Earlier that morning, the baseball team had returned from a weather-shortened trip to Las Vegas.
The football team joined the rest of the UH campus on spring break.
Seven members of the swimming and diving team were a week away from competing at the NCAA championships in Athens, Ga.
“It was chaotic,” softball coach Kristin Vesely said. “It was disheartening. How do you tell your athletes all the stuff we worked toward, all the momentum we gained, all the top 25 votes we are getting, they’re gone, they don’t mean anything right now?”
An early warning
A few months before the shutdown, Leroy Burrell had become aware of a virus that surfaced in Wuhan, China, and reportedly had infected dozens of people
At the time, the UH track and field coach was hosting a group of athletes from the Chinese national team on campus in early January. The group began to talk about the virus.
“Hey, this virus … we’re real concerned about it,” Burrell recalled one of the visitors telling him.
The Chinese national team members put together a few videos in support of Wuhan, a city of 11 million that had been closed off by late January. On Jan. 30, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency as the coronavirus outbreak spread beyond China’s borders.
“I was kind of aware of it and was a bit concerned even in January about the possibility of it heading our way,” Burrell said. “I just remember it building up to a point I was concerned even before we got notice that we were shut down that it was going to have a negative effect on us.
“It really hit home that it hit our shores when Rudy Goebert (the Jazz center who tested positive) and the NBA started shutting things down. I knew then we were in trouble.”
The night of March 11, Burrell was at home packing to join his athletes the next day in Albuquerque. He kept waiting for a call that the indoor championship had been canceled.
“I thought I was going to wake up in the morning and get a notification not to travel,” Burrell said. “But we didn’t.”
The vibe at the airport was “totally negative,” Burrell recalled. After landing, Burrell met up with Carl Lewis, UH’s assistant coach, and they drove to the Albuquerque Convention Center, where hundreds of athletes were going through practice sessions.
“My God, look at all these people,” Burrell said. “This is a superspreader event.”
Burrell said the mood inside the venue was “somber” as some of the close to 200 men’s and women’s teams already had pulled out of the meet.
“There was just a sense that it wasn’t going to happen, but we wasted our time traveling there and risked flying there and being in a room with people from all over the country,” Burrell said. “It just felt like this was going to be a mess.”
Shortly after Burrell’s arrival, a message was sent out: The meet had indeed been canceled because of COVID-19.
“You could hear the audible groan in the room,” Burrell said.
A U-turn for basketball
Early on the morning of March 12, coach Kelvin Sampson and the men’s basketball team packed the charter bus for the four-hour drive to Fort Worth, where the AAC’s postseason tournament was to be played. As the conference regularseason champion, UH was projected to make a deep run in March.
The day before, as major conferences decided to limit public access to postseason tournaments, Sampson had a “gut feeling” the AAC tournament would be canceled.
He exchanged phone calls with conference officials shortly after leaving campus. Once Sampson received official word from the league, he told his coaching staff and walked to the back of the bus, where players were asleep.
The bus took the next exit and made a U-turn back to campus. Sampson described the moment as an “emptiness that can’t be replaced.”
In the year since, Sampson said: “I don’t think we’ve ever had a 365-day period (like this). March 12 until today has been nothing but life lessons interspersed throughout.”
Those have included George Floyd to the Black Lives Matter movement, protests and marches amid the calls to end systemic racism, the early departure of Nate Hinton to the NBA draft, the torn ACL and remarkable return by forward Fabian White Jr., the abrupt transfer of guard Caleb Mills, the “daily stress” of COVID-19 testing protocols, a 14-day pause for a virus outbreak in December, and repeated scheduling headaches because of postponements and cancellations.
“It was one thing after another,” Sampson said. “The craziest, most challenging year we’ve all had.”
The first quarantine
UH baseball coach Todd Whitting remembers seeing signs that the sports world was about to be impacted during a series at UNLV.
“You could tell it was coming,” Whitting said. “We drove by (T-Mobile Arena) one day during the Pac-12 basketball tourney and there’s people everywhere. And you drive by there the next day and it’s a ghost town.
“You knew when you were getting on a plane to come home that it was going to be a different world when we got back.”
A few days after returning to campus, the baseball team became UH’s first athletic program in self-quarantine when a staff member developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19.
Four days later the quarantine was lifted after tests came back negative.
It wouldn’t be the last time UH’s athletic department would have to deal with possible or confirmed COVID-19 cases.
The 55 positive cases out of 6,849 tests from June 13 to Oct. 22, 2020 — the only data provided by the university after repeated openrecords requests — were a small sample of how the virus has impacted the school’s 17 varsity programs.
That number does not include outbreaks within the football and men’s basketball programs in November and December, respectively. In mid-December, Sampson revealed that all 15 players on the roster had contracted COVID-19 since the school began testing last summer.
Whitting said this week that the team had “a little bit of a (COVID-19) run” in late January-to-early February.
“Outside of that, knock on wood, we’ve tested negative ever since,” Whitting said. “The kids have done a good job of controlling what they can control. You can’t always control getting this thing, but you can stay out of places, stay away from crowds, and they’ve done a great job of trying to stay away from the virus as much as possible.”
Return to ‘normal’
Back in Mesa, Ariz., UH’s women golfers were playing a practice round the day before the Clover Cup. Chadwell, who was on the tournament committee, began to see college basketball cancellations.
“I knew we were doomed,” Chadwell said.
By then, golf programs from Kentucky, Mississippi State and Southern California had left for home. As the players came off the course, Chadwell gathered the group in a parking lot.
“You just don’t know what to do,” Chadwell said.
He pulled out his phone to calculate the driving distance to Houston, “because I thought there was no way we would be going through an airport considering everything that has happened.” But like other UH programs on the road, Chadwell’s team managed to board a flight and return to campus.
“Everything started to happen really fast,” Chadwell said.
A year later, 115.5 million total coronavirus cases have been reported since early 2020, according to the WHO. More than 2.5 million people have died of the virus worldwide.
The ongoing impact from COVID-19 is still apparent on the college landscape.
A moratorium remains on inperson recruiting. TDECU Stadium and Fertitta Center were limited to 25 percent capacity this season; baseball and softball have chosen not to have fans at games. Volleyball and soccer seasons, normally played in the fall, were moved to the spring.
The AAC decided not to host an indoor track and field championship. Seniors who normally would be ending their careers can choose to take a “bonus” year of eligibility and return.
The baseball team has yet to fully move into its new player development facility because of limitations on gatherings. The Athletics/ Alumni Center remains mostly offlimits other than to essential personnel.
“Those next couple months you couldn’t keep up or do anything with how fast things were changing,” Chadwell said. “No postseason, no recruiting … you’re sitting around wondering, will I have a job?”
In the months since athletes returned to competition, UH officials have applauded the largely successful testing protocols. Hope is on the way in the form of vaccines.
On Friday, the one-year anniversary of the shutdown, the golf team will be back in Mesa, Ariz. The softball team will make a trip to Oklahoma City. A Final Four contender, the men’s basketball team will play in the quarterfinals of the AAC tournament.
Life has slowly returned to normal. And still it hasn’t.
“It seems like a year has gone by, and not a whole lot has changed,” Chadwell said.