Above photo from gopack.com
OMAHA, Neb.-They never saw it ending this way.
As the groundskeepers tended to the field sometime past 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, as fans filed out of their seats and reporters hit the presses after Texas' late-night 8-5 win over Mississippi State, the NC State baseball team walked onto the field at TD Ameritrade Park one last time in 2021. They had not been eliminated from the College World Series by a loss. In fact entering Friday's game vs Vanderbilt, the Wolfpack was 2-0 in Omaha. That was the irony of it. Because as NC State stood behind home plate, taking photos, the team knew the season was over.
Perhaps we trace the story back to the beginning...12 p.m. Friday.
Something was up.
20 minutes before the start of the scheduled game between NC State and Vanderbilt, not a soul was present in the Vanderbilt dugout. Only a few NC State players could be seen warming up on the field. Then, in the blink of an eye, Twitter exploded. D1Baseball’s Kendall Rogers reported, followed seconds later by several other well-known baseball writers, that positive COVID tests had been detected with NC State's travel party.
The hypothetical alarm bells began the sound.
The questions came too fast. What does this mean for today's game? For the CWS as a whole?
How could this have happened to a team that has been in Omaha for the past week and repeatedly tested negative?
The first two questions had answers rather quickly. The first pitch was pushed back an hour as the NCAA scrambled to test the rest of the team. When the contest finally began, NC State's roster was smaller than most little league teams. 13 players represented the Wolfpack, with the hashtag #Pack13 taking root soon after. And wow, did those 13 play with as much tenacity as any team I've seen within the last year, maybe ever.
Sam Highfill, who outdueled mighty Vanderbilt Starter Jack Leiter in NC State's 1-0 win on Monday, was inserted at first base...having recorded a whopping 0 at bats on the year. You would've had no idea though, as Highfill cranked out a 3-for-4 day. In fact, there were new faces at four of the starting nine positions (excluding pitcher, including DH). Garrett Payne, a reliever by trade who was 0-1 with just 8 ⅓ innings under his belt on the year, started for the Wolfpack and lowered his ERA by two runs to 5.27, as he allowed just one earned run and two hits.
While Vanderbilt prevailed with a 3-1 win, NC State's remarkable fight was not overlooked by baseball fans across the nation. 13 guys playing in College Baseball's grandest event, against a perennial powerhouse? It is the kind of story only found in Hollywood. And a win in Saturday's game between the two opponents, as Vanderbilt's victory forced a second contest in the double-elimination bracket, would make the story all the more memorable.
But as it turned out, NC State never got that chance. Vanderbilt is now in the final, not because of a win, but because of an NCAA ruling.
Sometime around 1 a.m., as Texas and Mississippi State shuffled onto the diamond to resume a game that had begun at 6 p.m. and been halted by heavy rain at 10:39 p.m., the ticker on ESPN turned bright red. That could only mean one thing: breaking news.
But nobody was prepared for what the breaking news turned out to be.
In a statement released by the NCAA, health officials in Douglas County as well as the Championship Medical Team, had voted to boot NC State from the tournament due to positive COVID tests.
"The NCAA Division 1 Baseball Committee has declared the Vanderbilt-NC State Men's College World Series game scheduled for Saturday, June 26 at 1 p.m. Central Time a no-contest because of COVID-19 protocols," the statement began.
"This decision was made based on the recommendation of the Championship Medical Team and the Douglas County Health Department. As a result, Vanderbilt will advance to the CWS Finals.
"The NCAA and the committee regret that NC State's student-athletes and coaching staff will not be able to continue in the championship in which they earned the right to participate. Because of privacy issues, we cannot provided any further details."
Later on, early Saturday morning, D1baseball's Aaron Fitt released information stating that two unvaccinated players had tested positive, as well as four vaccinated players, making it six of the team's 27 players unable to play due to positive tests.
And because of that, NC State's season is over.
It is a tragedy for the sport, for NC State, and especially for Wolfpack head coach, Elliott Avent.
Explain to me how the NCAA is ok with 24,000 fans packing into the stadium, having no clue as to whether they have recently tested positive or not, yet is still testing entire teams, even those with players who are vaccinated for Covid or have the antibodies?
And let's remember, we're in the year 2021. Over a year and a half after COVID shut down the U.S. in March of 2020. Why is the NCAA still concerning itself with COVID, when it has been proven time and time again that young people, such as these players, are at such a minimal risk for actually being affected by the virus? To put it in perspective, these players could have walked into the stadium as regular fans, still having "tested positive" and nothing would have ever come up. There is a double standard when it comes to the NCAA. Paying fans are not held to the same strict regulations as the players those fans came to see play. COVID should be a non-factor at this point, with the vast majority of the nation either vaccinated or carrying the antibodies.
Avent was on point when he responded to backlash for not having a fully vaccinated team, saying Friday, “My job is to teach them baseball, make sure they get an education and keep them on the right track forward. But I don’t try to indoctrinate my kids with my values or my opinions. Obviously, we talk about a lot of things. But these are young men that can make their own decisions and that’s what they did.”
And they should not be punished for it.
There is no reason why NC State should not have been playing Vanderbilt this afternoon. And yet, the field will sit empty, the hopes of Wolfpack players and coaches wiped away as the result of what seems like a power move by the NCAA. Had they been allowed to play, the Wolfpack posed no real risk, with the players who had tested positive inactive and separated from the team. Those declared inactive due to "contact tracing" had not tested positive according to reports at the time of writing.
Remember the 2021 College Football National Championship in January of this year? Ohio State had 14 players out for the contest, six of them starters, who had tested positive three days before the game. But were the Buckeyes sent home? Nope. And the same protocol should have been applied now six months later in Omaha, in an equally important situation.
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