One Year Later: What the Past Year and COVID-19 Taught the Florida Gators
It’s been a year, since the world stopped. Since doors were closed, stands were emptied, restaurants were cleared. Since homes became offices and gyms and safe places. Since we saw our entire world pause, stutter and shift.
As fall approached, sports powered forward, determined to patch together a season and in doing so, gave us all a modicum of comfort and normality. They saved us, as much as one can be saved during a global pandemic.
Now a year later, with vaccination numbers rising while COVID-19 infection numbers drop, hope teases us. Teases us that soon life might return to how it was before. Except…it can never really be how it was before. Too many lives have been touched, lessons have been learned and conventions challenged for it to ever truly be how it was “before.”
So here on this one year mark of the world global pandemic in a century, the Florida Gators football team coaches and players stop once again. But this time, to reflect; to recall what it was like the day sports stopped, how they made it through a season and what they’ll remember going forward. And this time, they’re able to actually do so during spring practice—a time they didn’t receive one year ago, this week.
The Day It All Stopped
COVID-19 began to infiltrate our country in the Pacific Northwest during the early part of the 2020 calendar. At the time, no one could have predicted how rapidly and deadly it would spread. But it was on March 11, 2020 that American truly saw the impact this virus would have, for that’s the day sports were snatched away. A day after Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert had mocked the impending virus by touching every mic in a media availability, he tested positive. The NBA began to cancel games, within games.
The first domino had fallen. The following day, March 12, the NCAA cancelled March Madness for the first time in it’s over 80-year history. On March 13, we found out the Gators were cancelling their spring practice, in line with SEC decisions. Spring sports at Ivy League schools followed, then baseball, the Masters and before we knew it, we were anxiously watching the fourth Harry Potter movie to catch some decent Quidditch action to quench our sports thirst. Oh, that was just me?
This is what the ensuing months were like for the Gator players and coaches.
Offensive Lineman Stewart Reese: “For me, we were on spring break. It was the week of my spring break when I was still at Mississippi State. I drove down from Starkville to Fort Pierce. Basically everything broke loose then. First they extended the spring break a week. Next thing, four months later, I’m here.”
Offensive Line Coach John Hevesy: “no one knew what to do and how to handle it because no one’s ever been through it. It became a thing as a staff and everybody constantly communicating what we’re doing. I think at one point I said, hey we’re just going to do a little bit of a challenge. I put ‘em on Zoom or put ‘em on the text message and said, ‘Listen, send in a video of you jump roping. Let’s do a jump rope contest. Send your video in.’ I probably got seven text messages back, ‘Coach, I don’t have a jump rope.’
“I think Brett Heggie sent a video in of him with an extension cord as a jump rope. He said, ‘I couldn’t find anything.’ Like in life, find a way to adapt and get done what you got to get done. Again, you had guys with power chords, extension cords, anything they could do to find a chord.”
Head Coach Dan Mullen: “When it first started you're stuck in your home, right? I mean, everybody, you know, we didn't know what to do. You sit in your house, okay, well, what, 'Hey, guys, what can you do in your house to keep your body in some sort of good physical condition?'
“You have guys on our team that, you know, they're used to go, go, go, they're not, you know, kind of sit quietly in a room and work all day in a room. They're kind of more, you know, physical doers. And so, you know, just constantly trying to create different things to keep everybody in a positive direction mentally and physically.”
Linebacker Coach Christian Robinson: “Normally, during a season, I'm trying to get ready for a game and during the spring we're trying to get ready for practice. So when you're not having to go and practice, you know, I just said 'I'm here for you guys.' We just sat around talking, and 'hey what'd you do today', talking about their lifts, talking about their families, everybody OK.
“Last year was hard. I tell everybody. I will remember last season for so many things, and the people that you got to spend it with. And a lot of that was in quarantine because we're all in the house and we're all able to try to keep each other sane from afar and encourage each other.”
Lessons Learned
There were a lot of things COVID-19, quarantine and protocols taught us all. We learned how to pick the perfect Netflix show, how to entertain ourselves at home (so as to keep from killing our family), how to work from home whilst in pajama’s and goodness gracious, how important it is to wash our hands.
The Gators learned a lot of lessons as well; not only about football, but about life. Playing a season at all was going to be difficult and require sacrifices. Playing an all-SEC season would also require fortitude unlike anything they’d ever been asked.
It wasn’t easy. The Gators ended 8-4, had games rescheduled and was one of the programs forced to pause for three weeks after an outbreak put over 60 people in quarantine.
Still, the lessons the Gators will be taking with them as we begin to live again outside of COVID-19 are what they’ll remember the most.
Corner Kaiir Elam: “Coach Mullen told us that we’ve got to be resilient. You’ve got to be able to adjust on the fly and stuff like that. It was really different from my freshman year, but it is what it is. You’ve just got to adjust and make the best of your opportunities.”
Robinson: “I saw myself, I need to be an encourager, to give them that, 'hey, we're gonna come out of this. We're gonna come out of this at some point and we gotta be prepared for everything that's on the table. Football, life...' and I really think my room - I felt my room improve in those dark times of quarantine.”
Hevesy: “It teaches you to adapt to things. The big thing for us and our guys, COVID’s a negative thing. What’s a positive about this? Some guys get family, which you wouldn’t home with your family at this time, you’d be up here. Here’s your family time to use because it’s going to come back and we’re not going to have it. I think if anything, it was getting through to them and communicating to them.”
Mullen: “I could sit here for hours, you could write a book on all the sacrifices that have been made by the players to get to do this, but you know, I will say, this is what guys, that's what we love to do. You know, I mean, that is what we love to do.
“So I mean to sit here and…I’m not complaining or feeling sorry for us because we're getting to go do what we love to do, which is play football. Now, was it easy? No, it was extremely difficult. But is it worth all of that, those sacrifices you have to make and those challenges? Absolutely it is because we're getting to do what we love to do which is go play football.”
Tight End Kemore Gamble: “We learned that if you want something you gotta risk something to get something.”
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