Success Redefined: A Season Like No Other

A year like no other produced a season like no other for the 2020 Northern Illinois University football team. And it had nothing to do with the results on the field.

From team meetings on Zoom, to highlight films played on the wall of a parking garage, to coaches and operations staff serving team meals in to-go boxes, from ever-present masks and signs for social distancing to learning the difference between “antigen” and “PCR” tests, the year many want to forget will be long remembered. 

Second-year Huskie head coach Thomas Hammock has tried to put the challenges of 2020 in perspective for his team. 

“One thing I’ve taken from this year is, if you can get through this season, every other season should be a piece of cake,” Hammock said. “I told our guys, this may be the hardest thing you ever have to experience, and not necessarily from a football standpoint. I mean, the whole country was in a quarantine. If you can get through all these situations, it’s going to help you in life and it’s certainly going to help you on the football field.”

In 2020, wins were redefined. They came: 

• When the MAC announced that league teams would play a fall schedule on September 25 after initially moving the season to spring 2021;
• When the entire Huskie team was allowed to practice together for the first time on October 2;
• When the NIU season opener versus Buffalo kicked off on November 4, 2020;
• And on Friday, December 11, when results of the final day of testing revealed that the NIU Football team had made it through the entire 2020 season without a single positive COVID test among the student-athletes or coaching staff.

NIU Associate Vice-President and Director of Athletics Sean Frazier called the Huskies’ accomplishment of playing every game in a season even he thought might not happen “miraculous.”

“From the moment we decided as an institution and as a conference to attempt to play a six-game football season starting in November during a pandemic, this season was no longer about wins and losses,” Frazier said. “It was all about preserving the health and safety of our students and staff, while also providing an opportunity for participation. The 2020 MAC football season for me will forever have an asterisk as the ‘COVID season’ with a reduced schedule and conference only competition, but it should also be remembered for the resilience of our staff, students and supporters, and their overwhelming hard work to ensure that we kept everyone safe.”

According to NIU Assistant Athletic Director for Athletic Training and Sports Medicine Phil Voorhis, the key to putting the team on the field safely began with testing. 

“One of the biggest factors for the MAC presidents to make the decision to bring football back [this fall] was the accessibility to testing,” Voorhis said. “The challenges were to make that happen across five different states with five different state health departments, local health department guidelines and each institutions’ rules.”

The MAC established a conference-wide testing protocol of four antigen (rapid) tests per week, with anyone receiving a positive result then required to take the more reliable PCR test. While the antigen tests involve a simple nasal swab with results received in as few as 15 minutes, the PCR test is administered by a healthcare professional with the sample then sent to a laboratory and results returned in as few as 12 to 24 hours. The league office contracted with Quest Diagnostics to handle the testing protocol, and Voorhis and staff soon set up a testing area in the Barsema Hall of Champions. 

Four times a week, beginning when full team practices started on October 2, NIU student-athletes, coaches and staff that were in contact with the football team on a daily basis lined up two-by-two to be tested. While the Quest team directed the antigen testing of everyone in the Huskie Football “bubble”, NIU’s athletic training staff learned how to perform the PCR test and administered those. “Early in the semester, athletics worked with the DeKalb County Health Department and the university as the test group for their surveillance testing protocols,” Voorhis said. “As part of that, DCH came over and educated us on how to do the PCR testing, and we became proficient at it. We were also the first MAC school to do a trial run with the Quest set-up, and that was the baseline for the other schools to start from. The testing doesn’t take very long, but it’s labor intensive. It’s been a collaboration with the testing entities as well as the medical experts on making this happen efficiently and safely.”

Simply scheduling a time to test 100-plus people whose daily obligations included classes, practice, lifting and meetings, was a challenge. To find those times, assistant athletic trainer Ben Kastler worked with Dan Wolfe, NIU’s assistant athletic director for football operations. To say that the job of Wolfe and his staff – which typically involves coordinating all off-the-field aspects for the Huskie Football program – became more complicated in 2020 is a massive understatement.

“Working through class schedules, lift schedules, meeting schedules and testing has probably doubled the amount of work as far as logistics on where the players are and where they need to be,” Wolfe said. “We found ways to do it, and once we got into the routine, it wasn’t too bad. I was constantly working with the training staff trying to arrange how exactly the players can go from one spot to the next. Often, after 6 am practice, they have an 8 am class and a lift at 9 or 10 am. Aside from that and the travel aspect, figuring out how to feed the team has probably been the hardest part, especially at times when the dining halls have been closed.”

NIU made changes to the physical set-up of the locker room, the athletic training room, meeting rooms and the Northwestern Medicine Sports Performance Center to provide for social distancing. Lockers were blocked off in the Yordon Center and some of the team was moved to the visiting team locker room. The number of seats in meeting rooms was cut in half. Food provided during the week was “grab and go.” All rehab equipment was moved out of the training room and into a corner of the Chessick Practice Center. The NIU equipment staff instituted more stringent cleaning standards for equipment and gear. Of course, as in all university buildings, masks were required, and all practices were held outside, through heat, rain, snow, sleet, fog, cold and more.

Hammock said the reasons for holding every practice on Brigham Field was two-fold. 

“Number one, we had to continue to build toughness and mentality of our football team,” Hammock said. “The second reason was COVID. To me, the best thing to do was to stay outside because the more you are indoors in a group, the more chance that the virus will spread. We wanted to stay safe, we wanted to stay healthy and we did that while practicing outside all season.”

It’s no secret football teams are built on routine. Opponents are lined up years in advance. A team’s daily schedule is usually planned months out, down to meeting, practice and lift times, meals and meetings. In 2020, schedules were thrown out the window. According to NIU senior linebacker Kyle Pugh, Hammock set the tone.“It’s been an extension of Coach Hammock,” Pugh said. “We've all adopted the mindset of just winning the day, being in the moment. Tomorrow doesn't really matter and you can't do anything to change yesterday. The task at hand is pretty much all we work on and all we worry about. Change is coming, adversity is going to hit, so being in the now is probably the biggest adjustment that we've had to make.”

Hammock said he realized early on that adaptability and the ability to accept change was going to be necessary in 2020. He said he leaned on NIU team physician Dr. Brian Babka of Northwestern Medicine, head football athletic trainer Heath Duncan, executive associate athletic director and football sport administrator John Cheney and Wolfe when figuring out exactly how NIU could get through the season and as decisions were made.   

“We had to be light on our toes as far as being able to adapt and adjust,” Hammock said. “We had to take the mentality of ‘don't set anything in stone, write it in sand, and then be able to adjust it five minutes later.’ That was a challenge. It was a challenge to bring a team together the way that we bring them together, especially with so many new guys. 

“We had to figure out, what's the best way? What's the best approach? What are other people doing? We were able to gather some information from teams that started the season before us, that allowed us to put some plans in place as far as when we travel, how we eat at home and different things that gave us a chance to keep our young men safe and healthy.”

Frazier complimented Hammock’s leadership and the willingness of the staff and student-athletes to accept and even embrace a new way of doing even the most basic things. 

“You really have to have the psyche and commitment to tear everything down that you were doing and do something totally different, and to pivot on a dime,” Frazier said. “You had to completely forget everything that you thought was normal and [accept that] this is the new way we're going to do it and sometimes you’re going to feel uncomfortable about it. 

“It goes back to the students and staff. They deserve all the accolades for this because the testing process, the Zoom meetings, none of it was normal.”

While setting up weekly testing and practice schedules was challenging at first, the entire team would soon encounter a new set of changes when it came to game day, and especially when the Huskies went on the road. 

At home, simple adjustments included eliminating hotel rooms for the team the night before the game and moving the pregame team meals to the McCareins Auditorium in the Yordon Center instead of the Holmes Student Center. In addition to no hotel, bus costs were cut – changes that Wolfe anticipates will remain in place going forward. As the season progressed and COVID cases increased across the country, the NIU operations staff encountered new rules and regulations in Indiana and Michigan, while also instituting steps like assigned seating on buses and for meals and adding a bus to provide more spacing.  For the first road trip to Indiana to play Ball State, the team was allowed to meet as a socially-distanced group and to eat in the same room. Hotel staff was not permitted to serve the food, leaving that task to the support staff and football interns and graduate assistants, who were gloved and masked. In addition, the huge convention center space had spread out tables designed for eight with just four seats at each table. 

Keeping players in groups of four was a key number for the Huskies when it came to travel. The 60 to 64 players on each trip were split into groups of four. They ate at the same table with those four people, they sat on the bus – each in their own row – surrounded by those individuals. They sat next to each other in meetings and their lockers were set up next to each other. Among the four people in that group were either individuals who had already had COVID prior to the season starting, or their (permanent) roommate. With every player coming into close contact with only one other individual, if anyone did contract the coronavirus, contact tracing would be limited to one teammate. 

While the trip to Ball State provided one blueprint, that plan was thrown out the window on subsequent trips to play Western and Eastern Michigan as the team could not use meeting rooms or eat in the same room. Instead, what Kastler dubbed a “trick or treat” style buffet was set up. Every player and coach grabbed a plastic bag upon entering the large banquet room and visited several buffet “stations” where the masked and gloved support staff, grad assistants and interns filled plastic containers with salad, pasta, vegetables, a choice of proteins, cookies and drinks (water, milk, juice). After picking up dinner, everyone went to their rooms to eat, and meetings – whether offense/defense, special teams or by position - were held on Zoom that night.  A similar routine took place the next morning, but instead of returning to their rooms, players and coaches went outside where the offense and defense went through walk-thrus. In Kalamazoo, prior to the walk-thru, Hammock addressed the entire team and a highlight film was shown on the wall of the parking garage. In Ypsilanti, it was under a covered portico while rain fell.  

For Pugh, who mentioned how hard it was for the team to bond and get to know each other as a group throughout the 2020 season, the lack of team dinners on the road contributed to that. 

“Not having team dinners was one of the hardest things,” Pugh said. “That's usually a time just to sit down and have a meal, have a conversation, unrelated to football and be just people for a little bit before the game.

“Overall, one of the biggest adjustments throughout the year was how much I had to work to get to know my teammates. We couldn’t spend as much time together in big groups and we missed out on a lot of time together over the summer. The atmosphere of the locker room when we're all in there together is different, because we had people in a different locker room this year. The camaraderie is different. I’ve tried to just reach out to guys outside my position or my class, trying to connect through the classes, and making sure I'm interacting with the freshmen all the way up.”

In the end, NIU played every game – in the same order – of the 2020 schedule announced on October 7. While cancellations, postponements and schedule changes became commonplace across college football and for much of the MAC East Division, NIU and its West Division foes all played each of their six games.

One reason the Huskies got through the season, according to Hammock, was an early outbreak of COVID-19 among team members that caused football to shut down all activities for two weeks, beginning on September 18. 

“I think we learned to communicate better what the expectations were,” Wolfe said. “Once we realized that this is a young team and we need to communicate more, be transparent, give them an understanding of expectations, of where they need to be and how to do it, that put us on the right path.”

Voorhis said the process went beyond educating the student-athletes. 

“A lot of what we’ve done has been about how well the staff and students take the education to heart,” he said. “I’m not saying we’re better than anyone. You’re trying to manage something that’s really difficult, even without trying to be a participant on an athletic team. You don’t know where or how you can pick this [virus] up. I’m proud of our team and our staff.  For us, it doesn’t stop with the end of football season, because we have even more teams that will be starting to compete [in January].”

Pugh takes pride in what he and his teammates were able to accomplish, and believes the obstacles overcome in 2020 will pay dividends moving forward. 

“With all the adversity that we've been through this year, and all the reasons why we could have not made it to this point, we still found a way,” Pugh said. “We persevered through a lot of different things and found a way to see the light in a dark situation; I think that says a lot about our team.”

Frazier, whose hesitance to hold a season this fall was well-documented, believes the Huskies’ success – yes success – in 2020 can be attributed to its people. 

“Nobody was more aggressive than we were to say, let's hold off the season,” he said. “For us to be one of the few programs in the MAC, and really in the country, to not have a shutdown, a cancellation or even a positive test, is amazing. What does that say? Well, it shows you the commitment of the people involved in our process.

“You've got to start with the student-athletes, the young people 17 to 23 years old. They showed the discipline, the maturity and the passion to do what they said they were going to do, which is keep themselves safe and keep the people around the program safe. You have to take your hat off to the coaches, to the staff and obviously our athletic trainers and medical team. 

“As you can imagine the level of stress and extreme fatigue continues to be the norm for all our front-line staff and students. We have never experienced anything like this before, but after dealing with this daily adversity, my love and appreciation for the men and women that make up NIU's students, staff, supporters, and community is tremendous.”