One year ago, games slammed to a halt
Shock, surrealism of moment sunk in as virus hit New Mexico
“I remember sitting there sort thinking, ‘Is this really happening?’ ”
Richard Tripp remembers where he was when the pandemic finally reached New Mexico’s borders.
A longtime coach, athletic director and revered play-by-play announcer for ProView Networks, he was in the broadcast booth at the Santa Ana Star Center the night of March 11, 2020. A Las Vegas, N.M., man through and through, he was excited about watching that night’s intracity West Las Vegas-Robertson game in the Class 3A state quarterfinals in Rio Rancho.
“I think like the rest of us, I was staring at my phone watching everything start to fall apart all over the country,” he said. “I remember sitting there sort thinking, “Is this really happening?’ ”
The Big Ten had just announced it would not allow fans for the rest of its tournament, the NBA’s Oklahoma City-Utah game had been canceled without warning and, less than an hour before the Dons-Cardinals game, the NBA suspended its season.
Twenty-five miles to the south, New Mexico Activities Association Executive Director Sally Marquez had been fielding frantic phone calls all day, talking to state health officials and conferring with her staff. Holed up in The Pit for the peak of the state basketball tournament — widely billed as New Mexico’s premier amateur sporting event for years — Marquez made the shocking announcement that the remaining three days of the weeklong event would be played without fans or media present.
“I was sitting in The Pit just hoping we’d all get to see a Demons-Capital game in the semis,” said Santa Fe Public Schools athletic director Larry Chavez. “As all that news started coming out, everyone started talking about it. We’re all looking at our phones, asking questions. In just a few hours I went from wondering about an all-city game to worrying about what would happen to everyone in The Pit.”
An unbelievable time got worse in the ensuing days. The March 12 games went on as scheduled in The Pit but neither fans nor media were allowed. Media was
Richard Tripp, broadcaster, former basketball coach
granted limited access by March 13, but the tournament’s final day — arguably one of the most energetic sports days New Mexico celebrates each year — was held in shocking silence as the championship games for seven classifications were held in an empty 15,411-seat arena made famous for its fanfriendly decibel levels.
The final sporting event to take place in New Mexico in 2020 was the Capital-Cleveland game in the Class 5A championship the night of March 14. It tipped off at 8 p.m. By the time the buzzer sounded and the players left the arena roughly two hours
later, local sports as we knew it had ground to a halt.
Within days the NMAA formally suspended a number of spring sports events.
Before the end of the month, the rest of the high school calendar had been officially canceled, as were youth sports. The state was entering a sports ice age that had no timetable.
When asked about it recently, Marquez said the most difficult thing was not knowing what the world was dealing with. Worse still, not having any answers.
“There were so many unknowns, so many things people wanted answers for that I just couldn’t give,” Marquez said.
The NMAA wound up losing an estimated $600,000 from locking out fans at the basketball tournament and canceling spring sports. It flowed through the fall with several postponements that drifted through the holidays into February.
Almost as suddenly as it started, the reemergence of prep sports has been sudden and, at times, difficult to orchestrate.
Schools were allowed to practice in February and begin competing by early March.
As of this weekend, it was fullsteam ahead for most schools.
That includes a number of schools hit particularly hard, such as Santa Fe Indian School, Desert Academy and Capital. SFIS will remain in distance learning the rest of the school year, having its athletes compete for the public school nearest their home address. Desert Academy closed its doors for good last fall, and Capital, well, it has become a socioeconomic hit.
After leading his team to a win in Saturday’s oft-delayed season opener, Jaguars football coach Bill Moon said his roster is thinner than it was before the pandemic.
“We’re dealing with kids who have had no choice but to quit and get jobs, kids who have issues at home that make life understandably more important than being on a field,” he said.
When Tripp looks back, he still has a hard time wrapping his mind around those early hours of the pandemic. When he reported to the Star Center the morning of March 12, he was greeted at the arena’s entrance by a Rio Rancho police officer who escorted him to the broadcast booth and told him to remain there until his shift was over.
“And at the end of it, I had a security guy come in and get me, walk me back to front door and let me out,” Tripp said, recalling his first look at the face mask tgat is is now a part of our everyday wardrobe.
“There was this guy standing down by one of the tunnels that leads onto the court and he was wearing a mask over his face. I remember thinking how strange it looked. Here we are a year later and now it’s just as strange to think of someone not wearing a mask.”