2020: The year when sports called a timeout

By Jon Nowacki jnowacki@duluthnews.com

Williams Arena stands deserted as seen March 13 after the state girls basketball tournament was canceled amid growing concern over the spread of the coronavirus. (File / News Tribune)

When I was first assigned to make a contribution to our year-ending DNT Extra about the “Stories of the Year,” I was a little hesitant at first.

How do you sum up the craziest year in sports history in just 500 words?

Picking a starting point to how the craziest unfolded is arbitrary, but I’ll go with March 11, when the NBA suspended its season a short time after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus. Other developments had come before that, of course, but that’s when the dominos really started to fall.

The NCAA, which initially announced its winter tournaments would go on with limited attendance, quickly did an about-face after the NBA news and on March 12 announced its remaining winter and spring championship events for 2019-20 would be canceled, including its incredibly popular and profitable NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. When “March Madness” gets axed for the first time in its 81-year history, things were getting real.

That also meant that the Minnesota Duluth men’s hockey team wouldn’t get the chance to defend its back-to-back national championships — not this year, anyway — and the UMD women’s basketball team would never get the chance to play for a NCAA Division II Central Region title. Instead, the Bulldogs had to head back from Warrensburg, Missouri, the regional over before it had even started.

Back in Minnesota, the ensuing impact was becoming inevitable as one high school league after another quickly began canceling their winter tournaments, and on Friday, March 13, the Minnesota State High School League did the same thing. That left Duluth Marshall and CromwellWright, still alive at the state girls basketball tournament in Minneapolis, heading home, while so many boys basketball teams never got a chance to make that trip, their seasons canceled during sections.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Cromwell-Wright girls basketball coach Jeff Gronner said about hearing the news. “There were a lot of tears and anger and everything, and that was just me.”

And such began a pattern of hope followed by inevitable heartbreak and sadness as spring and summer seasons were canceled and signature Duluth events like Grandma’s Marathon went virtual-only for the first time. The third Saturday in June never felt so quiet. Five months later, there would be no annual Thanksgiving traditions like the Amsoil Duluth National Snocross or youth hockey tournaments as the sports-related economic impact of the coronavirus continued to climb.

Pro sports eventually returned amid a national state of social unrest, having the resources and ability to micromanage and conduct all the testing it would require to play games or race cars amid a pandemic, but the fans, for the most part, still haven’t been allowed to attend.

Both Minnesota and Wisconsin prep sports gave it a go in the fall, with mixed results as some teams were forced to drop out even before the season had ended.

While Wisconsin carried on to some extent, albeit not like normal, Minnesota put a pause on youth and high school sports as teams scrambled to get games in before Gov. Tim Walz’s Nov. 20 deadline. The near consensus among athletes and coaches had become cliche: something is better than nothing.

The Minnesota Duluth women’s hockey team started play Nov. 20 and the men Dec. 1, with the NCHC playing its games in a “pod” in Omaha, a system similar to what was used by the NBA and NHL.

While the local college fall seasons were wiped out, there remains hope for the winter and the spring, and if this past year has taught us anything, it’s that hope is a really good thing, but it’s certainly no guarantee. u