Florida State twice had to pause team activities last season due to positive COVID-19 tests that caused quarantines and contact tracing. So when the Seminoles entered protocols last month, forcing two games to be canceled because they could not play and a third because Boston College could not, coach Leonard Hamilton took a different philosophy in managing his team than the first time it occurred.
FSU has a combined 5-0 record the past two seasons in games returning after a cancellation or postponement. That total includes its 83-81 win at N.C. State last Saturday. But Hamilton’s secret is in not just asking his players to power through it.
“My approach was, this is the hand that was dealt us and everybody’s going through it, let’s man up and deal with it the best we can,” Hamilton told The News & Observer. “Now, I approach it a little different. I’m a little more sensitive to the mental strain it put on our kids last year being isolated.”
As the league and college basketball is facing another season of postponements and game cancellations, Hamilton’s approach at Florida State is an example of how ACC schools are using last year’s experience to handle potential stoppages. It starts with mental health.
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski told the N&O he’s encouraged the use of counselors to his players.
“If you are this athlete who has to compete at a high level, we have sports scientists taking care of the body,” Krzyzewski said last summer. “Well, the body is run by the mind. What we’ve tried to do is incorporate that in what we do.”
Coaches have made a concerted effort to communicate even more with their respective teams, especially when the rest of campus is on break and their players don’t have much else to do outside of basketball.
“What the players have had to go through these two years is extremely difficult,” Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said. “But at the end of the day, they want to play basketball and that’s what they want to get back to and that’s what makes their mental health good. And mental health is a lot better when they win than when they lose.”
Clemson coach Brad Brownell said he held more individual meetings with his players last season than in his 20 years as a head coach.
“I think people underestimate the morale, the spirit of your team and how important that is and how much that can fluctuate through a course of a long season,” Brownell told the N&O. “Making sure you’ve got a good pulse on your guys, and the morale and spirit in your team is really important right now with everything going haywire. That’s step one.”
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Step two is conditioning. Practice, in some respects, becomes secondary to making sure a team on pause stays in good enough shape to compete. Hamilton said he had a two week stretch where he never had a fully healthy roster available to practice. So instead of being concerned about what sets they were running, he deemed it more important to keep them in running shape.
Brownell admitted that was a blind spot for the Tigers last season during their first pause for COVID. They didn’t play for 10 days and their first game back turned into a 35-point loss to Virginia.
“Our first pause we came out of and we were not very good — in fact, we were bad,” Brownell said. “It took us a week and a half to get our wits about us and we lost three games badly.”
The biggest difference between last season and now is many players have received the vaccine and there’s even more who also received a booster shot. The outlook of testing positive doesn’t seem as dire as it did last season.
Krzyzewski and Notre Dame coach Mike Brey noted the boost provided by playing in front of crowds. Brey called last year’s empty stands a “downer” for everyone, especially the players. Krzyzewski said fans at Cameron Indoor Stadium “help restore some of the culture of Duke.”
“Everybody has lost something because of COVID — a normalcy or whatever,” Krzyzewski said last August. “Our basketball program has been a huge part of the growth of our university. Huge. Huge. I would like this year to be a huge part of us getting back to normalcy.”
Former UNC coach Roy Williams said at one point last season whenever he assembled his team for a talk, he had to first diffuse their concerns over canceled games. Current UNC coach Hubert Davis said when the Tar Heels had their Dec. 29 game against Virginia Tech postponed, the players laughed it off.
“They’re in a better place this year compared to last year of being able to handle change,” Davis said.
Just because they’re better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of COVID doesn’t mean anyone enjoys missing games.
“We’re on the edge of our seats hoping nothing gets canceled and we could play these schedules out fully,” UNC forward Armando Bacot said. “I don’t know, I guess we’ll see how the CDC and Orange County want us to go about it, but we want to play. Hopefully, it does not get to back to where it was last year.”
Staff writer Steve Wiseman contributed to this report.
