Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 13 No. 4 | March 2021

8 Inside Hokie Sports Ahh the madness of March. That time of year that beckons like a light at the end of a long winter tunnel. With promises of pulse- pounding drama and buzzer-beating hysteria. It is a long-awaited holiday of sorts for basketball fans—and in many cases for those that just like to be amateur bracketologists. Don’t put the red line under that Microsoft Word, it’s a word! In March of 2020, I wasn’t really thinking about any of that though. March of 2019, absolutely. But this was the tail-end of the first year for Coach Mike Young. When he arrived in Blacksburg he knew he had his work cut out for him. Most of the roster that had led Tech to the Sweet 16 the year prior was now gone. Coach had done a magical job of putting the remaining pieces together and adding a few new ones. That had led to some magical moments earlier in the year, including beating then-No. 3 Michigan State in Maui and dropping North Carolina in double overtime. But by March, reality had set in. This team was too young and incomplete to truly have aspirations beyond the ACC Tournament. As we arrived in Greensboro, I was excited about the future, but also tired. Without the allure of postseason excitement, the grind of going non-stop since July hits you pretty hard. When the Hokies lost to North Carolina in their first game in Greensboro, I felt oddly relieved. Little did I know that there would in fact be unimaginable madness. It just wouldn’t be on the hardwood. I remember having a debate with then-Strength Coach David Land at team breakfast before the North Carolina game. He was adamant that the coronavirus was going to seriously disrupt life. I couldn’t imagine it. I told him he was crazy. We agreed to disagree. I couldn’t have been more wrong, obviously. Shortly after I got back to Blacksburg, sports started shutting down. One by one they fell until nothing was left. I have been accused of being a workaholic, so that didn’t really slow me down. I started aggressively working on our affiliate station renewals. That got me through a few weeks. And then I got the phone call that I had been furloughed. Three months. No contact with the office. Of course, Tech had already sent the students home and Blacksburg was essentially a ghost town. We were able to work out at the team facilities for a couple of weeks and then that was shuttered. No travel allowed, and nobody around. Forced isolation is brutal. For adrenaline junkies, it borders on torture. So, there we all sat. For months. And literally could do nothing about the fact that our industry and society was crumbling around us. I didn’t handle it well. I’m sure my wife would tell you I was difficult to be around. And the days dragged on…and on. I remember thinking at the beginning of the pandemic. ‘Okay, we will do this for a few weeks and then get back to normal.’ I couldn’t have been more wrong again. As the pandemic dragged on into the summer, the unfathomable began to become reality. College football was in trouble. I’m not going to lie to you Hokies, there were many days where I truly believed with Jon Laaser When Madness was Just the Beginning we weren’t going to have college football. I’d think back to March 10th, when we lost to North Carolina in Greensboro and laugh at being relieved. Since then I had been furloughed, on unemployment and conducted nearly a hundred Zoom interviews. I didn’t even know what Zoom was in February. The madness was only beginning. At the beginning of August, we still didn’t know much. The Big Ten was about to shock everyone by announcing the cancelation of football. The Pac-12 followed. You know the story. The remaining Power 5 conferences hung in there and pushed forward. Cue socially distanced football practices and multiple tests per week. But, we still didn’t know how we were going to pull this off. Multiple ACC radio crews informed us that they wouldn’t be traveling to games and would be calling them off monitors remotely. Some schools wouldn’t allow their broadcasters to travel. So, I went to work trying to figure out a plan. The result was a nine-page Covid broadcast guide. It included building plexiglass partitions, spreading out our broadcast across two booths and fallback plans in the event one of our crew got Covid or contact traced. This wasn’t madness anymore. This was insanity. And then the postponements happened. Well, first we got a modified schedule. And then the postponements. I had just finished prepping for NC State and got word that game had been postponed. I turned my attention to the Commonwealth Cup and had just completed my prep for that game. And then you know what happened. And then I dusted off my NC State board and crossed off the names of the players who wouldn’t be playing for Tech. There were a lot. And coaches too. Didn’t know Justin Hamilton wouldn’t be available. Insanity. And then the Hokies won. In an empty stadium. I had parked my car right in front of Lane like I do in the off-season when I’m organizing the gear. I didn’t like it. Anyway, we somehow beat Duke and Khalil Herbert was a monster. And on the season went. But for a bit without me. I had lunch with a friend that tested positive for Covid a day later. Morally I was required to shut it down for two weeks. I missed my first ever Tech football broadcast. Bryant Johnson stepped in like a pro. I hated every second of it. The quarantine and not being there. The next thing I knew, Mike Burnop and I were in a bubble in a casino. In Connecticut. And Mike Young and company were beating then-No. 3 Villanova. And there was nobody there to see it. And then, I was eating pregame pizza because that’s what was helping us win. And then we smashed Virginia and got our cup back. And somewhere along the line, everything blurred into one never-ending game of trying to figure out which mask fit best. We called games from monitors, we called games from the corner of arenas, we called games from abandoned suites. James Torgerson built me a Covid broadcast cubicle at Cassell Coliseum.