Exactly two years ago, the little-known school halted basketball games due to the fear of the coronavirus, not knowing what would happen next.
Elliott Charles, a young administrator at Chicago State University, believed he’d “committed professional suicide” when he made the rare decision to cancel basketball games due to a developing health crisis two years ago.
On March 4, 2020, the move made the little-known school the first in North America’s four major sports leagues or the NCAA Division I to cancel games due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“I had that moment of great palpitation,” Charles, the school’s athletic director, reflected recently on the choice made exactly two years ago. “This isn’t what athletic directors do. We’re not epidemiologists, after all. I’m not a political figure.”
When discussing the collapse of sports in the early days of the pandemic, the early and foresighted move of Chicago State, a federally mainly designated Black college on the city’s South Side, is rarely highlighted.
Instead, most of the sports world attributes the cancellation floodgate to March 11, when an NBA game among the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Utah Jazz in Oklahoma City was abruptly canceled seconds before tipoff.
Following that, collegiate basketball conference tournaments were canceled one by one in the second week of March. Baseball’s spring training ended abruptly on March 12, and the NCAA basketball tournament was known as March Madness, one of America’s most important sporting events, was also canceled on that day.
Charles’ supervisor, university President Zaldwaynaka Scott, has stated that she didn’t realize at the time — despite the fact that it’s now general knowledge — that immunocompromised persons, such as cancer patients, are especially vulnerable to Covid-19.
She added that, like most people at the time, she had little idea of the virus’s spread or the hazards that the school’s personnel and kids faced.
“We were far behind in terms of science. As a result, no one understood anyone’s vulnerability to it, “Scott stated.
“There was no vaccination, and there was little understanding of how it was transmitted. I mean, there was a time when we were discussing surfaces and cleaning down goods.”
According to Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, being the first athletic program to close its doors couldn’t have been an easy decision.
“It’s always easier to get on board with something that’s moving, has momentum, and people believe in,” Lebowitz said. “But, to be the first to say it, people do not regard you as an oddity. They see at you as if you’re nuts. Let’s give them credit if that’s where the groundswell began.”
The men’s basketball team at Chicago State was scheduled to fly west to play Seattle University on March 5, 2020, and Utah Valley University on March 7. On those days in Chicago, the women’s team was slated to play the same schools.
Before that week, however, Seattle had been named as the country’s coronavirus hot zone.
On February 29, the first confirmed death from the virus was recorded near Seattle, prompting Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to claim a state of emergency. (Months later, it was discovered that the first coronavirus death in the United States occurred weeks earlier near San Francisco.)
The assumption that Seattle was particularly dangerous compared to Chicago may now seem absurd, given that Covid-19 has killed more than 958,000 people in the United States and at least 5 million people globally, with little respect for borders.
Still, for a two-time leukemia survivor like Lance Irvin, the men’s basketball coach at Chicago State at the time, the notion of boarding a plane to the Pacific Northwest was unsettling. On March 1, he expressed his concerns to the school’s administration.
“Back then, strange things were happening, and no one knew why. People were dying around there, and the last thing I wanted to do on my watch was put children in that circumstance and then call their families and say, ‘Something happened to your child,’ “Irvin stated. “From that perspective, it’s a dreadful sensation, and I didn’t want to be accountable for it.”
Irvin’s fears sparked a flurry of phone calls to doctors, coaches, and officials before Charles sought Scott for permission to cancel games.
“I was afraid that canceling these games would be career suicide,” Charles explained. “I’ve never heard of any such thing like this before.”
Charles, 38, had started at Chicago State only three months before the pandemic. He previously worked as an athletic director at the University of Alabama, Florida A&M University, the University of South Florida, and Clemson University.
This release is articulated by Prittle Prattle News in the form of an authored article.
