Just a few weeks ago, there were sports. There were games. There were even arenas packed with fans.
 
On Wednesday, March 11, despite the continuing news about the global pandemic known as COVID-19, games were still going on in America, including 69 NCAA Division I men's and women's basketball games. The Mid-American Conference women's basketball quarterfinals were played in Cleveland with attendance limited to family and essential personnel. In Greensboro, N.C., the Northern Illinois University softball team played a doubleheader at UNC Greensboro. NIU Baseball took on Missouri that night in the second game of a midweek series. It was during that night's game that sports in America started to come to a screeching halt.
 
As the Huskies were battling the Tigers, the National Basketball Association announced the immediate suspension of its season at 8:32 p.m. CT, roughly five minutes after news broke that a member of the Utah Jazz had reportedly tested positive for the novel coronavirus. With the Twitter world abuzz with that news, the Big Ten, Southeastern, and Big East Conferences all announced they would play their respective men's basketball tournaments with no fans in the stands.
 
Meanwhile in Columbia, Mo., the Huskies rallied from a 1-0 deficit to tie its game at Missouri 2-2 when Brendan Joyce scored on a passed ball in the top of the ninth. The Tigers eventually scored the game-winning run in the 12^th inning to cap the nearly four-hour ballgame. It would be the last NIU athletics competition of the 2019-20 academic year.
 
---
 
Thursday, March 12 started out like any other day for the NIU athletic teams that were on the road during the university's spring break. The Huskie men's basketball team was scheduled to take on Miami in the MAC Tournament quarterfinals that day in Cleveland. Softball was in Virginia, getting ready to play in a tournament at Liberty University. Baseball was en route to St. Louis for a weekend series versus Saint Louis University. Men's Golf was in Jacksonville, Fla. for a morning practice and a day at the PGA Tour's PLAYERS Championship.
 
NIU men's basketball head coach Mark Montgomery: "It started off as an exciting day. "We had an early shootaround and the team before us didn't take their time, so we stretched on the floor and you could tell there was an excitement in the guys' body language. They were so upbeat, so excited and we probably had the best shootaround of the year."
 
"After coming back (to the hotel), we went to breakfast. Everything was great, we did a highlight film and everybody went back to their rooms, got into their routine and we were planning to leave early enough to watch the first game. Then, we had to call the guys right back down and I remember Eugene German already being dressed for the game, and we were still an hour away from leaving."
 
NIU softball head coach Christina Sutcliffe: "The morning was just business as usual. "We got to meet with Dr. Dot Richardson, who is the head coach at Liberty and a two-time Olympic gold-medalist. While we were in that meeting, the tournament schedule was being rearranged as some schools couldn't get to the tournament."
 
Men's golf head coach John Carlson: "We'd spent about a day and a half in Jacksonville. We played Sawgrass Country Club, which is right across the street from the TPC Sawgrass where THE PLAYERS Championship is held. On Thursday, half of the team practiced in the morning and the other half went over to TPC Sawgrass and watched THE PLAYERS all the way until we met them. We ended up leaving there about 8:45 that night."
 
"Many of our guys had never seen the 17^th hole at Sawgrass, which is one of the most iconic holes of golf in the world. To be able to watch the best players in the world, with a crowd about half the size of normal because everyone at that point kind of knew maybe the rest of the tournament was going to be cancelled - and be able to walk up close and personal with the best players in the game made for a really exciting conclusion to our season as I look back at it."
 
Baseball head coach Mike Kunigonis: "We had breakfast at eight a.m. and the plan was to leave the hotel by 9:30 to head to St. Louis for practice. "We were executing that plan as things went down. Things started to evolve around 10:00 when I got a phone call from Saint Louis' head coach Darin Hendrickson basically saying that their campus was completely shut down, zero events going on. I asked the bus driver to pull over to give me a bit of privacy to have this phone conversation because I didn't want to have it in front of the team and create any panic. We pulled off into a little shopping plaza where I got off the bus and had that talk with the Saint Louis coach. He called me to let me know the Atlantic-10 [Conference], at that very moment, was pulling guys off the court at the Barclays Center at their tournament."
 
"I ended up getting on the phone with [Executive Associate Athletic Director] John Cheney, who informed me there was going to be a press conference from the MAC and that's kind of right when everything started to happen."
 
Sutcliffe: "We went to eat and by the time we got back to the hotel about an hour later, the tournament was cancelled. It was definitely a whirlwind. I spent three hours and 46 minutes on the phone with Southwest trying to change our flights. I think the uncertainty of it all was probably the hardest part."
 
Kunigonis: "Looking back now, it was maybe a little bit silly, but I was in the regular season mindset, so my question to Darin was if we could find another venue and play at a neutral site. Darin basically said 'Mike, this thing's gonna blow up here soon. Make sure you're on the phone and looking at Twitter and the news and all that stuff.'"
 
"He was in the office so he probably had a little bit more access to news outlets than I did on the bus at that point. Once I realized exactly what was going on we needed to find the course of action for our guys. We got lunch because we were going to be on the bus for the next five hours. Once I heard anything, I told the guys what was going on because I try to be as transparent as possible with them."
 
Montgomery: "At first the question being asked from [Associate Vice President/Director of Athletics] Sean Frazier and [Senior Associate Athletic Director and sport administrator) Courtney Vinson was to see if [the guys] still wanted to play, because we didn't want to make any student-athlete play if they were worried about the coronavirus. All of our guys wanted to play, but then it changed."
 
"As we were still doing those meetings, some other conferences had canceled their tournaments and then we canceled our tournament. We had guys in separate rooms and in hallways, and you could see the guys, especially the seniors, lost it. Noah McCarty was real quiet in the corner where the team was, but we couldn't get Eugene German and Lacey James to come meet with the team. They were so disappointed that they were losing out on what they had been working four years for."
 
Sutcliffe: "I was trying to get some solutions and get some answers before I met with them. By the time I had gotten to the team, they had a lot of the answers as they saw what was going on.  Any time you tell a team their season's over in March, it's never a good conversation or an easy one for sure. We were able to get a flight out Friday around noon. We got up, started driving to Raleigh and got on our flight."
 
Carlson: "Throughout the day I was following different cancelations via Twitter as they were coming in. Later in the afternoon, I saw something saying the NCAA looks like it's going to cancel spring sports. [Senior Associate Athletic Director] Ryan Sedevie called me as I'm at the range and that was the first time that it kind of set in that our season was over and we weren't going to compete in Orlando the next day in the Mission Inn event. It was probably even tougher for the families that had already made their way to Florida for the weekend."
 
Kunigonis: "There was some shock, a little bit of awe, and some non-belief from the guys, none of those things meaning in a bad way. As much as we think it was coming out of nowhere, we knew what was going on and everybody across the country knew. I think that was the day that it just finally hit and things boiled over. I think we were all hoping that something like this wouldn't have happened."
 
"One of the best things for us was we were still on the road. It's not like we were sitting at home watching this unfold. At this point, it wasn't anything different than what we were doing the week prior or what we'd been planning on doing in the weeks to come. It was definitely a unique experience for sure."
 
Montgomery: "It was emotional. There were a lot of hugs, a lot of crying, a lot of explaining to players that sometimes things aren't fair but your safety is the most important thing and we were not putting the safety of student-athletes before anything else. Then it was time to pack up and get on the road, get everyone back safe. We had a lot of angry, frustrated, sad student-athletes that wanted to go out and play."
 
Carlson: "Our guys were dispersed all around TPC Sawgrass. As you can imagine at a PGA Tour event, there's a lot to watch and everyone's got their favorites to see. Mike Mattas came up to me and said 'Coach, is this really happening?' We were at the back of the second hole and just didn't say anything for the first couple minutes, knowing that we were not going to compete the rest of the year. I talked to the guys at different times but spent the most time chatting with Mike a little bit after that.
 
"We were there until the last putt that was hit by Rafa Cabrera Bello, who's played on the European Ryder Cup team. That was the last putt hit in the dark to finish the day and then the PGA Tour was suspended. It was kind of fun for us because, looking back at it, we were the last spectators to watch a professional tour event but also kind of sad that there were so many events getting postponed."
 
Kunigonis: "I basically said to the guys 'listen, you're going to be getting the information as I am by just watching Twitter. Once I know how this is going to affect us, I'll let you know.' So we just watched and followed as Duke basketball said it wasn't going to go to the NCAA Tournament regardless of whether they got invited or not, then Kansas tweeted something like that and then all of a sudden we're seeing the different Power 5 baseball conferences saying whether they were going to postpone until further notice or just completely shut it down as the Big Ten did."
 
Later that night, the MAC announced it was canceling the remainder of the spring sports season.
 
Kunigonis: "We officially didn't find out until we pulled into the Convocation Center on the bus. I just happened to refresh my Twitter feed. I was on the MAC Twitter feed, hitting refresh for all five hours of that ride because I was trying to deliver the news to the guys. I just thought it was my responsibility for the guys to get this information from me and not have to read it and it finally came through the second we pulled in. I told the guys we would reconvene in the locker room in 30 minutes because we were still in travel mode. I gave them a little bit more information other than just the hard-hitting 'this is what it is'."
 
Carlson: "We packed up Friday morning from Jacksonville and drove to Paducah, Kentucky and spent the night, then drove through a snowstorm in Champaign back to NIU that Saturday. It was a bittersweet end to the season because we had done well in our last round at the tournament we had just played, we'd had great preparation on the spring break trip and we were prepared to go to Mission Inn and get a win for our team. That's kind of the way that our team was trending, so I would say that it all kind of sunk in for me on the drive home a little bit more than our players because they were looking at what the next steps were for them for the next couple weeks.
 
"I wish that there would have been a postponement of spring sports from an NCAA standpoint, but at the same time now that I see what the pandemic is doing all across the world, ultimately everyone's safer at home. I know our players are safer at home and that's what matters."
 
Sutcliffe: "Through the first several days we were trying to figure out what was going on as information was changing by the hour. It was tough to play chess while the pieces were moving so-to-speak. Once that settled down and we knew we were going to go to online classes, it became, what's the new norm? We set up an academic game plan for them. They're checking in with me every day as far as task lists and what not. We're staying in some sort of communication with them every day and just trying to keep them focused on school with what we can control the rest of the semester."
 
Kunigonis: "I went into the mode of how to move forward from here and trying to continue to get that message across to our players. This is where we're at and we can either fight it or we can overcome and adapt to it and continue to get better from it. In any crisis, or any time, you have an opportunity to make the best of it or allow that crisis to eat you up and let it take advantage of you. I'm in that mode right now where we need to make the best of this opportunity and try to find that silver lining as best we can."
 
---
 
What happened to NIU's spring sports are not an isolated case. All 32 NCAA Division I conferences have cancelled their respective spring seasons. Major League Baseball's opening day has come and gone. The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo have been moved to 2021. Several other events that are mainstays on the sporting calendar have been postponed. 
 
This is certainly a momentous time in history. Fifty years ago, singer Joni Mitchell wrote in the chorus of "Big Yellow Taxi" "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone." For now, sports are gone. Eventually they will return, but for those affected by the events of March 12, this time – and that day – will never be forgotten.
 
--NIU--