As Ohio State wrestling coach Tom Ryan has navigated the challenges of a season amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he’s often drawn inspiration from what another Buckeye sports team accomplished this fall.
“The more I go through this year already, the more I’ve texted Ryan Day and said, ‘Dude, you’re my hero,’” Ryan said in a recent interview. “It’s pretty amazing with the Big Ten protocol and COVID the way it is that they were able to put a team on the field that did what they did.”
Despite initially having its fall season canceled, eventually having its eight-game regular season shortened to five games due to COVID-related cancellations and losing key players to positive COVID-19 tests for each of its final four games of the year, the Ohio State football team made it all the way to the national championship game this past fall, highlighted by a 49-28 Sugar Bowl win over Clemson in the College Football Playoff semifinals.
That’s served as an example for all the other Ohio State sports teams competing this winter and spring of how to handle the challenges the coronavirus has presented to their own seasons.
“As we watched the football team and they’d be getting ready for games, then they’d get canceled and they’d have to get on to the next one,” said Ohio State women’s basketball coach Kevin McGuff. “Just seeing that, regardless of what happened, they showed up and they were ready and they were prepared. So I just think for me, I’m watching that, saying like, ‘Hey, we need to be ready because this is going to happen to us too. There’s no way to avoid it.’”
While the Big Ten ultimately reinstated its fall football season, every other Big Ten fall sport was postponed to the spring, which means all of Ohio State’s other sports teams have either been competing this winter or will soon begin their seasons this spring. But while teams like women’s volleyball were waiting to start their seasons later than usual, they were watching and learning from the football Buckeyes this fall, and they’ve tried to emulate those Buckeyes during their own seasons.
“I have some friends that are on the football team, and I just asked their perspective on how their season was,” said women’s volleyball sophomore Jenaisya Moore. “And they said it’s tough, just knowing that any action that you do has a follow-up to it. So you just have to be safe, follow protocol and just grind through it, honestly. It definitely was a good lesson, I think.”
Since their seasons have started, many of those teams have had to deal with the same challenges of stops and starts and schedule changes that the football team did. And many of them have also succeeded despite the challenges they’ve had to overcome.
Women’s basketball, for example, has had seven games either canceled or postponed this season, including four games in a row in December when it had to pause team activities due to a COVID-19 outbreak within the team. But the Buckeyes have persevered through those challenges to go 13-3 in the games they have been able to play so far this year.
“It’s been tough,” McGuff said. “I think probably just the fact that we’ve got some older people in (senior guard Braxtin Miller and junior forwards Aaliyah Patty and Dorka Juhasz), they’ve provided some leadership and just kind of keeping the kids together and keeping their mentality where it should be amidst all these kind of stops and starts.”
The Ohio State women's basketball improved to 13-3 on Thursday with an 100-85 win over Purdue. (Photo: Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch via Imagn Content Services, LLC)
Jen Flynn Oldenburg had to wait more than a year to coach her first game as Ohio State’s new women’s volleyball coach, as a season that typically starts in late August did not start until January, and those Buckeyes have had to deal with some schedule changes, too. Nonetheless, those Buckeyes have demonstrated their adaptability by getting their Big Ten-only season off to a 7-0 start.
“I think the biggest thing we’ve just talked about over the last few months is being adaptable,” Oldenburg said. “And I think whether they’re comfortable or not doing it, they’re buying into it, because it gives us an opportunity to play.”
UPSET ALERT
— Ohio State Women's Volleyball (@OhioStateWVB) February 18, 2021
Ohio State erases a 2-0 deficit and storms back to take down No. 8 Penn State!#GoBuckeyes pic.twitter.com/wQLwgRBJHh
Like the football team, many of Ohio State’s other sports teams have had to deal with the challenges of shorter seasons without non-conference games. Wrestling, for instance, is set to conclude its regular season against Penn State on Friday night even though its regular season just began in January; those Buckeyes, who would typically start their season in November and participate in several tournaments and non-conference duals before beginning their Big Ten slate, have instead had to wrestle a slate of nine duals in five weeks without any non-conference matches.
Yet they knew all along, like all other college sports teams this year, that they’d have to deal with an unusual set of challenges this season.
“This presents a lot of opportunity,” said Ryan, whose team enters Friday night’s dual with a 5-3 record this season. “The teams that manage things the best are going to have the best chance of doing well at the end. But this has really been a year about, quite frankly for us as a staff, managing expectations. We always want to be the best team in the country, and this is a year that you gotta just take one step at a time.”
Through it all, Ohio State’s coaches have all been in communication with each other as they’ve faced some of the same challenges between their respective sports.
“Our administration is awesome because we have a lot of phone calls as a whole coaching unit,” Oldenburg said. “So Gene Smith will go on there and lead these calls for all of our head coaches and then all the coaches together with assistants and director of ops. And it’s just like lessons learned. ‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this,’ or ‘Make sure you’re not doing this.’ ‘When you’re on the road, do that.’ And I think all of those things come into play.”
Even though every Ohio State sports team has faced some unusual tests this year, many of them have proven more capable of overcoming those challenges than their competition – such as the Ohio State men’s basketball and women’s hockey teams, which are both currently ranked in the top five nationally – and they've been able to move forward even when their teams or their schedules have been impacted by COVID-19.
In a year where it was initially unclear whether even Ohio State football would get to play, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith is proud that Ohio State has so many teams competing and succeeding right now.
“Things are going well,” Smith said Thursday morning during an appearance on the Greater Columbus Sports Commission’s Virtual Sports Report. “Over the next four days, we will have 21 events among all of our sports, 21 events home and away. And that’s what we fight for, is to give our young people a chance to compete. So it’s going well for us right now.”
