Editor’s note: This article was originally published by USA TODAY Sports and has been republished in its entirety below.
Halfway through what would turn out to be his football team’s final practice of the 2020 season, Charlotte coach Will Healy spotted athletics director Mike Hill walking toward the field and figured he probably wasn’t bringing good news.
The previous few months hadn’t given Healy a reason to expect anything else. At various points, Charlotte had learned of games being canceled from its charter plane on the way to North Texas, from its team hotel in Boca Raton, Florida, and on a Friday afternoon when Georgia State got a bad batch of COVID-19 test results — only to learn later they were false positives.
All in all, Charlotte had somehow dealt with eight games being canceled or moved by the time the 49ers got to the final week of the season, an emotional roller coaster that even led to Healy breaking down in tears over a Zoom meeting when he had to deliver the news that a game against Western Kentucky had been postponed.
“I was a basket case,” Healy said. “Just lost it because I know how bad they wanted to play. I felt like every time I addressed them as a group it was to tell them a game was canceled.”
And just as Healy expected midway through that Dec. 9 practice, he was going to have to do it one more time. Marshall officials had informed Hill that COVID-19 issues within their program would not allow them to play Dec. 11, and that was that. The 49ers’ season was going to end at 2-4.
“It’s now the ninth game of the year canceled and you’re sitting there saying, ‘What do you do? Do you let them keep practicing?’ ” Healy said.
From the beginning, he had promised his team total transparency about whatever situation they were facing, and he held to it one last time. He stopped the drills, gathered the players and delivered the news to a lot of blank stares. Some of the seniors spoke and Healy, thinking quickly, organized the team into two lines so the departing players could run through a makeshift tunnel off the field one last time.
“It probably wasn’t the most incredible experience they could have; I just wanted us to thank them as they ran off,” he said. “I wanted it to be as special as possible.”
After it was over, Healy went into the stadium bleachers, found a spot where no one could see him and laid down on the concrete. He knew what had happened to get to that point was completely out of his control, but Healy couldn’t escape the feeling that it was somehow his fault. “All you talk about in recruiting is the student-athlete experience,” he said. “And we couldn’t give them a great student-athlete experience.”
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