The Texas Tech Red Raiders were in Hawaii for a weekend tournament when the COVID-19 pandemic caused the NCAA to cancel the Women’s College World Series, while every collegiate conference either postponed or canceled their spring sport seasons.
Head coach Adrian Gregory was in the midst of her sixth season at the program’s helm and her squad carried a 17-9 overall record. Now more than a month since the 2020 season suddenly ended, coach Gregory recently sat down with JWOS to chat about the season’s sudden end and her activities during quarantine.
JWOS: Before things officially began to come down and we began to see cancellations, what was your thought process prior to that time about the coronavirus? Was it something where you were concerned, something that you were actively thinking about? ‘How is this going to affect softball and my team?’
Adrian Gregory: I think that is probably just dependent on your personality in general, but I’m not much of a worrier with stuff like that. For me, I’m very much of a realist. So when it comes down the chute and it’s tangible, then I’ll deal with it, but outside of that, I really don’t spend a lot of time on the hypothetical. I knew that [the coronavirus]was something that was happening in our world and and I knew people had been affected. And, you know, we prayed for those people and parts of the country that are being affected but short of that, I wasn’t actively planning anything in case things were going to shake out like that. Literally, when it became very real was just really on Wednesday. Prior to the decision on Thursday, we played Hawaii, we were in Hawaii, and [Hawaii head coach Bob Coolen] said that we weren’t going to shake hands at the plate and we weren’t going to shake hands postgame. So at that point, I was like, ‘Huh, okay, this is how it’s gonna affect us.’ We played the game. We didn’t shake hands. Super odd. That’s just we were up to Thursday morning when everything sped up very fast.”
JWOS: That’s something that I want to ask you about specifically; you were sitting there in Hawaii, hours from home, when all of this came down. Did that add an extra dimension to your reaction, coupling the surprise and shock of everything that was going on with the fact that you were several time zones away from home?
Gregory: I actually think it was kind-of the opposite. We were definitely delayed, because we were five hours behind Central Time. So the amount of information that we were operating on was definitely behind. So when we would wake up, there’s all of this information that wasn’t there when we went to bed. So in that regard, it was challenging to try to catch up with everything that’s happening. You know, we were six hours behind East Coast time so that part was a bit challenging, in that we were delayed in getting all of the information that we could get and then we were late in giving it to our players because, you know, we didn’t mandate a certain wake-up time or anything since we were going to be playing at 1:00, I believe, and were going to leave at 11:00… so we kind of had this major holding pattern for most of that morning, and we had talked to some of the other coaches, but you’re really just in a waiting period. We actually found out about it all on Twitter. That’s how we found out that our season was canceled. That’s how we figured out that our game was canceled. That’s actually also how we eventually found out about our seniors getting their year back, through Twitter.
JWOS: Wow.
Gregory: And of course, our administration definitely tried to catch up with us for sure, and so I was constantly on the call with our SWA. And we had a coaches huddle up. It was just delayed from, you know, when you’re, originally get all that information. So that morning, the Big 12 hadn’t made an announcement prior to our game. We had pulled our boys off of the basketball court, but short of that we hadn’t had an official announcement from the Big 12, and neither had the Big 10. So definitely interesting to try to figure out what was going to happen [with the scheduled game against Minnesota]. [Minnesota head coach Jamie Trachsel] and I just said, ‘well, we’ll prepare like we’re gonna play. You know, we’ll get ready.’ Our kids were getting dressed. And at that point, we were just waiting to hear what we would hear.
JWOS: So when you do find out that your season is canceled, that the World Series is canceled, when all of that finally did come down… what was the feeling, the demeanor? For you as a coach, for your staff, players… how did y’all process that? What was your mindset in that time?
Gregory: Well, my first priority went into caring for our kids and making sure our kids were okay. That meant going into problem-solving, catastrophic-planning for young people who don’t know exactly what’s going on. And this is all very unknown to begin with. Initially, I probably didn’t think about it until about a week later as far as coming to grips with it. In Hawaii, it was almost ‘oh wow, this is what it is.’ It was making sure our seniors were okay. And then I was trying to understand this unknown, which is even harder for young people who are used to knowing so much information about everything for their whole lives, and now you’re in this situation of not knowing anything… ultimately, though, I think our first reaction was really something of ‘Okay, we’re okay. It’s going to be okay, even though it’s all unknown right now.’ And then we were able to go on a little adventure, to the north shore as a team, and that was really special, and a little bit of it was to try to distract them, but it was also something of a way of saying, ‘hey, let’s be right where our feet are. We can’t control any of this around us, but let’s be where our feet are and have a great experience.’ I really feel overly blessed that we were in Hawaii, because we kind of had a four-day pause before we came back and when we came back, things were much different.
JWOS: Y’all spent a little while in Hawaii after you found out?
Gregory: Yeah, we stayed until Sunday. We found out on Thursday, and stayed until Sunday. We couldn’t get all of ours out; we couldn’t get enough seats back. Our travel party is rather big, but we definitely tried. Our department initially says ‘come back,’ everyone is trying to protect their family, it’s just a little bit more challenging to get back from Hawaii.
JWOS: Can you tell me about your thought process once you did get back to the mainland, back to Lubbock, on how to balance the season begin over and seniors’ careers being potentially done simultaneously with everything going on in the world? Was softball even in your mind at that point?
Gregory: It was definitely in my mind, and I honestly didn’t think our seniors were done. That was our first conversation with compliance, what this meant for our kids. Our compliance coordinator is awesome, and she told us we should just pause and assess what the NCAA is going to put out. We told our kids, don’t go to worst case scenarios, don’t automatically go to ‘this is the end’. We made sure that our kids had the proper things to travel with – Lysol, hand sanitizer, all of that – and I was honestly super thankful that we were in a place that took some of the immediate edge off; if we had been in Lubbock, I think that would have been a bit harder to do. We made sure our kids reached out to their families and made sure that they knew they were okay, and a lot of our families were in Hawaii, so we did a lot of things with families as a program.
JWOS: What has life looked for you during this quarantine? Having time off now, in March and April, isn’t something that you’re too familiar with.
Gregory: It’s still so strange how much stillness there is that you’ve just never had before, you know? Being able to go on bike rides was not something that I prioritized before, even though I probably could have forced it into our chaotic schedule. I’ve never seen so many families out in our neighborhood; kids walking their dogs, parents riding bikes with their kids or pushing their toddlers around on some little souped-up SUV toy. I’ve never seen that before in our neighborhood, and we have a ton of families in our neighborhood. I honestly believe there are so many silver linings in this, that we as an economy just had to slow down. And I’m very thankful that I’m in a career that allows that.
JWOS: I want to ask you, too, about the ruling allowing everyone an extra year of eligibility. There’s still some things up in the air, but you already mentioned that you didn’t think your seniors’ careers were done, even early on.
Gregory: We had heard things all over the place on what was going to happen, and it all depends on what you read, right? I think you were seeing things all over the map on what different conferences wanted, and things like that. I really had no clue. I thought that our seniors would get to come back for sure. What I was really dreading was who had to make the call… it has to be me and I know it, but that’s just the one time that you don’t want to be that person. But thankfully, they didn’t happen and things didn’t shake out like that. I thought it could have gone any way, but we just waited and I’m so happy that it turned out the way that it did. Like you said, there are a ton of things up in the air still, but I was very happy and proud of the NCAA for making that decision. I know it comes at a major cost for individual departments, though, so we’ll see how that shakes out.
