GAC football coaches struggle with unknowns

With the NCAA shutting down all sports seasons and facilities last month, football teams that were getting ready for their spring football games were forced to wrap up practice and cancel their final walkthroughs without any idea when they would retake the field.

The Great American Conference, which consists of six NCAA Division II schools from Arkansas and six from Oklahoma, was no different. Many of the football programs had spring games set for sometime in April, and now the coaches are left wondering if they will even get to have a full season this fall.

“Most of our kids come back on campus for summer school, too, so if we get them back in July, we’ll have plenty of time to get everybody prepared and get them in shape and all that stuff,” said Henderson State head coach Scott Maxfield. “If we get them back in August, we we basically have about 22, 23 days to get ready for our first game. The way it’s set up this year with the way school starts, we’ll only be here five days on campus before the regular students get here. To me, that’s really the time that you really develop your football team is when you know, you’re the only ones on campus, but it’ll have some challenges to get them ready and probably have to do things a little bit differently than we’ve done in the past maybe.”

The biggest concern for Ouachita Baptist head coach Todd Knight is conditioning for the athletes.

“The big concern right now is, depending on how long this thing goes, is what kind of condition are these kids in to start our normal football season?” he said. “And that very well could be the problem. It’s a health and safety issue [if] you put a guy out there late August and early September in that heat that’s not ready. I know [for] the NCAA, that’ll be a hot topic of guys being in great condition and guys being ready to go.”

There are several rumors floating around about how the NCAA will handle the entire situation.

“You hear all the stories, the possibility of not having a season, which would just blow my mind,” said University of Arkansas at Monticello head coach Hud Jackson. “Or the possibility of, if campus opens back up July 1,

NCAA might let you bring in kids, sort of like [Organized Team Activities] like the NFL does.”

Regardless of the decision by the NCAA, the continuing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic weighs on the coaches’ minds.

“It’s devastating,” Jackson said. “You just hope that it gets to a point — it just scares you. When you think about it, there’s not a vaccine for this. They’re gonna see that we flattened the curve, like they keep talking about. Then we let people go back to games, and we play, and then, heck, it starts all over again. It’s, it’s just one of those deals: What is the right answer? I just can’t sit here and fight that part of it until a decision is made.”

The student-athletes are also struggling to cope in this new world.

“That’s the biggest challenge is making sure they’re staying on top of all their academic responsibilities when you’re not there to oversee it,” Maxfield said. “A lot of kids don’t have access to Wi-Fi, computers. I mean, they’re trying to do everything on a smartphone, and it’s hard to take online classes on a smartphone. Libraries are closed. All the places you could possibly go — public places — for a laptop computer, they don’t have that access. That’s the biggest challenge is just making sure they’re able to do all their online work. And then a lot of them have never taken online classes.”

One of the toughest things for the head coaches is not knowing what the next step will be.

“There’s a lot of questions from players, and coaches as well, that I really can’t answer because I don’t have any definite answers,” Knight said. “As we get those things, we’re putting putting those things out. We’re meeting as a staff every Monday, spread out in a room and doing a calendar. Then everybody’s heading out to do their individual jobs. … I guess it’s frustrating from a leadership standpoint because there’s not a lot of direction.”

The unknown is also leading some of the staff to look into other options for employment, in case they are left without a job.

“If there’s no football, there’s gonna be some programs that might not be able to survive,” Jackson explained. “I’ve got guys on my staff that have friends that coach in other places that have — those football staffs have let everybody go, except the coordinators and the head coach. … I’ve got a civil engineer that’s gonna start working on his certification to make sure that he’s up to date there. I’ve got a couple other coaches that are going to try to work on certification for being a teacher in high school because that’s one profession that you could probably go back to because they’ll never get rid of [it] in that regard. But it’s crazy to even be thinking about that.”

In the end, the coaches and players are just waiting to see what decisions will be made and how it will affect them going forward.

“We’ll just have to see the calendar, see the timeline because again their health and safety is really gonna affect that calendar,” Knight said. “How many games can you play? Can you play them all? Do you have to move the season back? What do the playoffs look like? Do you have playoffs? Do you not have playoffs? All those things are up in the air, and again all that is going to be dictated by the health and safety of the players?”