The coronavirus likely cost a UK coach the NCAA title. It was not John Calipari
Imagine if the 2020 NCAA men’s basketball tournament Final Four had been slated to be played in Rupp Arena.
Imagine if the Kentucky Wildcats not only reached the Final Four, but were ranked No. 1 in the country and featured the two hottest stars in college hoops on their roster.
Then, with UK the prohibitive favorite to add another national title trophy to its collection, imagine if a black-swan event, a pandemic, caused the NCAA to cancel the Final Four.
That exact scenario is essentially what happened last week to Kentucky Wildcats rifle coach Harry Mullins.
Rifle’s NCAA Championships were scheduled for last Friday and Saturday in Memorial Coliseum. Seeking UK’s third rifle national title, Mullins had the No. 1-ranked team in the country.
The two brightest Kentucky stars, freshman Mary Tucker and sophomore Will Shaner, qualified in February for the United States Olympic Team in air rifle.
So deep was the UK roster, five different Wildcats got some level of All-America recognition from the Collegiate Rifle Coaches Association.
For Mullins, Kentucky’s head rifle coach since 1987, it was the dream scenario: One of the best teams he’s ever coached with a chance to win it all before the home folks.
Of course, that was snatched away at the last moment when the NCAA, as part of the efforts to contain the coronavirus, announced last Thursday that the rifle championship had been canceled.
“I was so proud of our kids, of the work they did all year,” Mullins says, “so, for them not to have the opportunity to finish it off, I don’t want to say it broke my heart, but it was definitely disappointing.”
In the big picture of what our country is dealing with in terms of a pandemic that is taking lives as well as the economic dislocation being caused by the shuttering of so much of the American economy as a containment measure, sports disappointments are trivial.
“It was a tough decision, but it was the right decision,” Mullins says of the cancellation. “I think we’d have had a nice crowd in the Coliseum. If one person out of 700, 800, 1,000 people came and was carrying the coronavirus, well, just do the exponential math on what that could have meant once everyone left and started circulating (among the general populace).”
That reality does not remove, however, the massive impact on athletes and coaches that has been caused by COVID-19.
A news consumer, Mullins said he entered last week with the idea in the back of his mind that the coronavirus might wreak havoc on the rifle championships.
“We were always hoping as coaches we’d be able to get it in,” Mullins says. “But I kind of had a feeling (that wouldn’t happen), especially after the (conference) basketball tournaments started wavering.”
Unsurprisingly, Mullins says the toughest part of the experience was having to tell his team they would not get to compete for the NCAA title they were favored to claim.
During a post-Christmas break training camp, Mullins had laid out goals for his youthful but talented roster:
Win the Great American Rifle Conference regular-season title.
Take the GARC Conference Tournament championship.
Put at least two UK shooters on the U.S. Olympic Team.
Win Kentucky’s third NCAA championship.
The Cats had done the first three. All that was left was to achieve was the final one.
“We just started making this laundry list of things, and they just kept knocking them down ‘boom, boom, boom,’” Mullins says. “And the greatest thing about this team was, every time they set a record, every time they did something (big), they would come in the next day and work harder in practice.”
For Mullins, the fact that Kentucky was hosting an NCAA rifle championship was a major deal in itself. Rather than the UK Rifle Range in the basement of Barker Hall, the event was being held in Memorial Coliseum — the venerable on-campus basketball facility known as “The House That Rupp Built.”
“Did you think we’d ever get to shoot guns in Memorial Coliseum?” Mullins says. “That was cool in itself. And our facilities people knocked it out of the park. The construction of the (shooting) range and the layout was spot on. It was really special seeing Memorial Coliseum set up the way it was.”
After the cancellation, as workers in Memorial broke down the shooting range that was never used in competition, Mullins says he took a seat in the bleachers and visualized how the weekend might have gone under non-pandemic conditions.
“I kind of watched the movie in my mind,” he says.
Looking for a bright side to the championship cancellation that prevented Kentucky’s young team — all five of the All-America honorees have remaining eligibility — from concluding its dream season, Mullins has found one.
“If we had won the (NCAA) championship, I was having a hard time figuring out how I was going to motivate them next year in terms of putting that carrot before the horse,” Mullins says. “I told the team, ‘This should give us plenty of motivation for next year.’”
