I was at the O’Connell Center a little early on Feb. 26 for Florida’s men’s basketball team’s matchup against LSU. After wolfing down some press box food, I was feeling a little sentimental.
See, I knew it was the last Gators home game I was covering this season, and, as someone who is graduating in the fall, it might be the last time I was going to be in the O’Connell Center covering sports.
What I didn’t know was what was right around the corner. I didn’t know that sports as a whole would be canceled just 15 days later. I didn’t know that I would become the sports editor of a newspaper with no sports to cover for an entire summer.
It seems like a lifetime has passed since the last time sports were in our lives, and now I’m tasked with leading a staff of writers to cover something that isn’t happening, at least in the traditional sense. It’s a challenge for sure.
It’s funny just seeing what happens when you take something like sports, which may not matter all that much on a larger scale, and you remove it completely.
My family’s annual spring ritual is being stationed in front of the television watching playoff hockey and eating dinner together. Now, that’s replaced with stuff like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!” as we awkwardly search for something to talk about.
Here at alligatorSports, the changes are even more obvious. Usually, we’re busy in the summer covering the end of the season for spring sports and postseason tournaments into June. Unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury this year.
I think of the times that sports were a welcome distraction from the events of our world, like Mike Piazza smashing a home run in the first baseball game in New York after 9/11, Steve Gleason blocking a punt in the first game in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, David Ortiz dropping the F-bomb in a rousing speech after the Boston Marathon bombing or Feleipe Franks walking it off against Tennessee just days after Hurricane Irma.
I hope that we can continue to be an effective distraction in these trying times, despite the lack of actual sports being played. It may not be the usual coverage we provide during the summer, but we’re going to do our best to come up with creative, engaging content.
I want to thank Kyle Wood for being a great sports editor in the spring in the face of unprecedented times in the world of sports, and I hope that we can continue to provide great sports coverage this summer, especially if we finally see the return of sports at some point.
In the meantime, we’ll be staying inside, hanging out on Zoom and doing whatever we can to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Things aren’t normal, and they probably won’t be for a while. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t be there until normalcy returns.
Follow Brendan on Twitter @Bfarrell727 and contact him at bfarrell@alligator.org.
FILE - This is a March 12, 2020, file photo showing Capital One Arena, home of the Washington Capitals NHL hockey club in Washington. Get used to the concept of pods and pucks if the NHL is going to have any chance of completing its season, with the most likely scenarios calling for games in empty, air-conditioned arenas during the dog days of summer. (AP Photo/Nick Wass, File)
