Meet the Staffers Holding College Basketball Teams Together Amidst a Pandemic
Thirty-six hours before San Francisco’s men’s basketball team expected to depart for its season-opening tournament in Nebraska, plans unraveled.
LSU, USF’s season-opening opponent in Lincoln, backed out of the tournament on Nov. 20 to play in the Billiken Classic in St. Louis. By that night, the Dons had decided to back out as well and had signed to play in the Bubbleville event at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.
The job of getting the team across the country on short notice fell to Jonathan Safir, the team’s director of basketball operations (DOBO). Unsurprisingly, Safir didn’t sleep much that weekend, frantically coordinating destination changes with the charter plane company, getting revised expenses approved by his administration and making sure the players filled out the requisite paperwork to be able to participate in the event.
San Francisco wound up participating in the Bubbleville event at Mohegan Sun.
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Safir and DOBOs around the country may not be allowed to recruit on the road or coach on the court in practice, but they are the glue keeping college basketball programs together in the scrambled mess that is the 2020–21 season. The job of a DOBO varies slightly from program to program, but they are traditionally in charge of travel planning, meals, equipment and all the other logistics of running a college basketball team.
“A good operations person can be defined as someone who is finding problems before they exist or preparing for problems before they occur,” Texas State DOBO Alex Hausladen says. “Even if they never occur.”
With the pandemic, virtually every part of a program’s operations has to be adapted to fit into COVID-19 protocols, all the way down to the locker room. Siena DOBO Greg Fahey says his team can have only 10 people in the locker room at a time, so he stands near the door with a magnet board with each player labeled “in” or “out.” He even purchased holsters for student managers to carry hand sanitizer on their belts so they can always have it with them during practices and games.
“Everything is planned out. … What edge can we get to prevent this thing from happening?” Fahey says. “We’re trying to take every precaution we can.”
Despite all of those adjustments, COVID-19 still hit Fahey’s program as hard as any in the country. Since the start of November, the Saints have endured three separate pandemic-related pauses and are just one of three teams in Division I that intended to play games in November and December but haven't been able to yet.
Fahey himself tested positive for the virus during the team’s first shutdown in mid-November. This meant he didn’t need to quarantine during the team’s next two pauses. As the only coach allowed on campus, Fahey bounced from working out the few players still allowed in the gym to delivering food to players in quarantine to hopping on team Zoom calls that involved team-building exercises and daily workouts with the strength coach. He even coordinated a large order for the quarantined players from the region’s only Chick-Fil-A, a hot commodity in town located in the Albany airport beyond the security checkpoint.
“I was running around a little like a chicken with his head cut off,” jokes Fahey.
Meanwhile, San Francisco played 10 games between its season opener on Nov. 25 and Christmas—a feat managed by just 13 other teams in the country. But doing so has been anything but smooth. USF didn’t know who it was playing in its season opener until less than 24 hours before the game and agreed to play Virginia during its stay in Connecticut while at a refueling stop in Salina, Kansas. Later, its game against Cal Poly was moved from USF’s campus to its opponent’s due to local restrictions, so Safir had to book a day-of-game charter flight (a rarity) on 24 hours’ notice. The Dons also had a game canceled against USC, but they were able to pick up another Pac-12 opponent on short notice with a game at Oregon.
Safir says he has spent a lot of time “working the phones” to find games like that Oregon trip swiftly, in addition to all of his normal responsibilities. He credited graduate manager Garrett Furubayashi for helping handle some of the logistics like pregame and postgame meals and athletic trainer Nicki Graham’s management of all things COVID-19 for his ability to focus on bigger-picture items like scheduling.
“It would be damn near impossible without help, really, throughout our entire office,” Safir says. “I’ve been fortunate to have more support than maybe I expected or that I would have in a normal year because of the craziness of it all.”
Nearly 2,000 miles away from USF, Texas State’s season has been an anomaly of its own. The Bobcats have played all nine games as scheduled—no opponent switches, no postponements and no venue swaps. But that doesn’t mean Hausladen hasn’t had plenty to do.
“Those questions that you would normally have for a regular trip of ‘how would I handle _____ and what does the itinerary look like?’ Well now you have to take the COVID questions and put them on top of your normal questions,” Hausladen says. “You’re essentially creating a sublist under your own list.”
Hausladen says he tries to adapt old routines into COVID-19-safe practices while allowing them to still fit into the same schedule to avoid disrupting the traditional flow of a trip. Most involve trying to reduce interactions outside the team travel party, like asking for all hotel rooms to be on the same floor or packing snack bags so players don’t go to the front desk or a convenience store. And with many hotels closing traditional meeting rooms, Hausladen now books extra suites that can be used for treatment or film.
The uncertainty of the pandemic also constantly puts DOBOs on the receiving end of questions from players and coaches looking for answers.
“Sometimes it’s just a lot because you’re just getting asked question after question but there’s so much unknown and you don’t have answers and that leads to frustration,” Fahey says.
At the same time, Safir believes the pandemic has made teams realize just how much work goes on behind the scenes.
“It has allowed others to give a little bit of appreciation for the thankless tasks,” says Safir. “It’s always nuts, even in a year without COVID.”
San Francisco, under coach Todd Golden, has started the season 6–4.
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All three DOBOs noted that relationships and communication were keys to success on the job, whether that be with your team, other DOBOs or partners like bus companies and hotels. Fahey says he has a group text with several other DOBOs in the region that he has used to ensure he’s doing paperwork correctly, while Hausladen says his relationships throughout the Sun Belt have allowed him to pick up some best practices from other schools and learn how best to handle the bumps when they do come.
For Safir, that bump came before his team played its first game. After a long day of travel from San Francisco to Connecticut, USF finally arrived at Mohegan Sun at around 9:30 p.m. ET. But just as the team was ready to finally settle down after eight hours on a plane and another 90 minutes on a bus, Safir was told the team would have to wait an hour longer on the bus while another team cleared out of the COVID-19 testing area inside the hotel.
“I didn’t even know to think about reaching out and making sure they were ready for us [at the testing center],” Safir says. “That was when I realized, ‘Wow, this isn’t going to be like any other year.’ ”
