The empty gym symbolizes the season.
Not even parents allowed, never mind students or paying customers.
Game night is more like practice day for Hanover College with perhaps louder echos. The NCAA Division III men’s basketball team down the road in Hanover is playing ball this winter, despite the coronavirus, even if no one in Seymour would know.
The spotlight is never as bright on D-III as it is on always-televised Division I or the NBA. But this is a school with a lengthy basketball tradition and multiple links to this immediate area and one that did not wish to forfeit the campaign, even if many other conferences and schools at their level did so.
The first COVID-19 pandemic signal washed over Hanover’s summer basketball camp operated by the Panthers’ coaches. The camp goes back more than a half-century, and players of multiple generations in the same families from Seymour, Brownstown and other local communities have attended.
But not in 2020, when camp was called off because of the virus.
“The 54th annual, we couldn’t have it,” said Hanover coach Jon Miller. “We are hopeful we will be able to do the 54th annual one year late.”
Last summer, Americans assumed things would be better by autumn. It was boggling to imagine the coronavirus would still be rampaging through the populace with 101 million people afflicted worldwide with about 2.2 million killed, including 441,000 deaths in the United States.
The world, the nation have been upside down, held hostage by a disease, for more than 10 months, and sports, basketball, represent only a tiny segment in the grand picture of life.
Pandemic life is a different animal. Whatever is not canceled is rearranged.
Miller was not sure his guys would have a season at all. In autumn, they coped with three different two-week breaks between quarantines and Christmas vacation. They have ended up with a shortened one.
The big schools, Division I, began play Nov. 25. Hanover, a member of the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference, played its first game Jan. 9.
Going into last night, Hanover had squeezed in four games, going 2-2. Two others were canceled.
“Who knows how many games you will have?” said 6-foot-3 sophomore Ty Houston.
As so many have learned, it is risky to breathe. Each Wednesday, the team gathers at 7 a.m. for COVID testing. If players are healthy, they embark on back-to-back games against the same league opponent that weekend.
“We get those back that night,” Miller said of the tests.
One rule-altering response to the pandemic the NCAA initiated was to not count this as a year of competition against any athlete’s eligibility. That would give seniors the opportunity come back next year for a real senior year.
However, Division III doesn’t give athletic scholarships, so players must cover school costs. Seniors could choose between sticking with this sort-of season or play again next year in anticipation of everything maybe, hopefully, perhaps, returning to normal.
Guard Isaac Hibbard was league player of the week one day, and within days, he was off the team, out of school as the semester changed. It was like a top player incurring a season-ending injury.
“You could call it that,” Houston said. “It’s a big decision for those seniors.”
The Panthers have a youthful roster this season, but rather than provide any additional tutoring has to limit them, monitor them, keep players apart more than usual, conducting 5-on-0 shooting drills instead of 5-on-5 scrimmages.
Miller has coached at Hanover for 13 years and 18 years overall.
“I can’t say that there’s any type of situation I can possibly compare this to,” he said. “It’s just different in every way.”
Houston, who in a recent game was the Panthers’ top scorer with 18 points, said there is something lost when a team competes without an audience. Division III schools know they are not going to be viewed by millions on TV, but they are used to being watched by some crowd.
“No spectators, that is very big,” Houston said. “All the time, you can definitely feel it. You do kind of miss that atmosphere.”
Players don’t even receive a golf clap for a great play (except from their own bench). They don’t even get heckled by opposing fans. It is somewhat like playing in a vacuum.
Restrictions aside, virus threats looming, the iffiness of the schedule one week to the next and with no witnesses, the Panthers know they are fortunate they can still play basketball where someone is keeping track of the score.