The athletic director at Miami University received an unexpected phone call six months ago, when life was normal, offices were full of people and sports were played. That was about to change. He had a coronavirus problem.
It was the morning of Jan. 28 when David Sayler was informed that a student who’d recently arrived on the university’s Ohio campus from Wuhan, China was displaying potential symptoms of the deadly virus that was spreading halfway around the world. Miami had a basketball game that night against Central Michigan, whose players were already headed to the arena for their shootaround. There wasn’t much time to decide what to do next.
The schools’ athletic directors, doctors and top officials were suddenly facing a question they’re still trying to answer: Is it safe to play sports?
They determined long before anyone else in the U.S. that it wasn’t. This was the first game in American sports to be called off because of the coronavirus—and it was weeks before the NBA season was suspended and the NCAA tournament was canceled.
“It probably makes sense today,” Sayler said. “But to a lot of people back then, it didn’t.”
The decisions to postpone the Miami vs. Central Michigan men’s game and the Miami vs. Western Michigan women’s game the following night were among the first ripple effects of a microscopic pathogen that was still months away from ravaging sports. And there are two reasons you probably never heard about them. The first is that they were Mid-American Conference basketball games. The second is that they happened in a frenzied sports week that began with the death of Kobe Bryant and ended with the Super Bowl.
But overshadowed in between was this widely overlooked decision that would turn out to be a sneak peek at the future. High schools, colleges and professional sports leagues now find themselves in the position of Central Michigan and Miami—but with football instead of basketball. They have six months of data, contingency plans and scientific research. They also have little idea whether sports and the virus can coexist.
The virus wasn’t on the radar of most Americans when Michael Alford, Central Michigan’s athletic director, glanced at his phone while in the Detroit airport on that January morning. Sayler was calling. He told Alford that a student who had recently traveled from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, went into Miami’s student health center with mild symptoms.
Alford didn’t know much about the virus. “We had no idea,” he said. Almost nobody did. Only recently had the cluster of mysterious, pneumonia-like illnesses in China been linked to a novel coronavirus. There were five identified cases in the U.S. at the time. The student and his traveling companion were the first two suspected cases under investigation in Ohio, and it would take days for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to analyze the test results and confirm the negative results.
What happened next was a case study in decision making amid the uncertainty that was about to sweep the world.
Alford immediately called administrators including Dr. George Kikano, the dean of Central Michigan’s medical school, whose scientific background played an instrumental role in the decision-making process over the next 20 minutes.
Kikano wasn’t sure how the virus was transmitted or that people cramming into a confined space to scream inside happens to be an excellent way for this respiratory illness to spread. But he knew enough to know the situation in China was grave. And he didn’t want a basketball game to be the source of an outbreak in the U.S.
“I don’t follow sports,” he said. “It was just connecting the dots together and being careful.”
Alford got off the phone and called Central Michigan’s basketball coach, Keno Davis, whose team was beginning warm-ups for shootaround in Miami’s gym. He told them to get back on the bus, go to the hotel and wash their hands.
The game was off.
Classes had not been canceled. Miami’s campus had not been closed. But the basketball game that night would not be happening.
Miami and Central Michigan are Mid-American Conference rivals. The men’s basketball game on Jan. 28 was shut down due to a coronavirus scare.
Photo: Ernest Coleman/Zuma PressSayler said that Miami would have played if Central Michigan had been comfortable. But when he peeked outside his office, which is located in the basketball arena, Central Michigan’s players were already bolting. Then he began the strange process of publicly canceling a basketball game because of an unknowable, unquantifiable risk that was hard for most people to wrap their minds around.
Everyone involved had to be informed: coaches, players and thousands of fans. There were tweets. There were calls to season-ticket holders. There were big signs on the arena’s doors for the handful of confused fans who came for a game and walked into the beginning of a pandemic.
It would take five days to get closure. Miami’s tests were shipped to the CDC on a Tuesday. The negative results came back on Sunday morning. The school held a news conference that afternoon with Amy Acton, then the director of Ohio’s health department, who would later become something of a pandemic celebrity. “I remember because I missed the first half of the Super Bowl,” Sayler said.
It wasn’t their first case. But it was their first scare. And it wouldn’t be their last.
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Kikano said his early encounter with the virus prepared him to embrace change in a country that is now feeling the consequences of inaction. In the middle of March, when shutdowns were localized and institutions were reluctant to make changes until the virus hit closer to home, Kikano said Central Michigan had already taken preventive measures. The campus salad bar was a thing of the past long before the nearby metro area of Detroit had a surge in cases.
The postponed game was eventually played on Feb. 27, two days after the CDC ominously warned of severe disruptions ahead, and it’s now clear that the virus was prevalent in certain pockets of the country already. Sayler would find himself in an eerily familiar situation a few weeks later.
March 11 was the night that an NBA player tested positive and the shutdown of American sports began. Miami had a conference tournament game on March 12.
That morning, as MAC athletics officials heard themselves discussing empty arenas and pregame temperature checks, Sayler remembers looking around the room and thinking: “Are we really going to do this?”
They were not. The basketball season would be over by the end of the day.
“It was déjà vu,” Sayler said, “and I feel like I’ve been living it every day since.”
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Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
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