Senior softball player Vanessa Vodan found out from a social media post by the NCAA that her senior season was over. Her heart stopped and she prayed it wasn’t true. 

Vodan was in her room in an off-campus apartment packing up her stuff to head home. The team was originally scheduled to leave that day to travel to Oklahoma for the University of Oklahoma Tournament. 

“It was like, what’s going on?” she said. “Are you serious?”

The NCAA announced the cancellation of all spring and winter sports seasons on March 12. 

Vodan, who was a catcher and utility player for the Flashes softball team and threw javelin for women’s track and field, reached out to her teammates, friends, family and boyfriend about the news. 

“I told the people that were closest to me,” Vodan said. “[I] didn’t even think anything of it.”

The track and field indoor season already ended, but was set to start its outdoor season March 27-28, though softball just began tournament play. 

On the morning of March 12, the MAC cancelled both the men’s and women’s basketball MAC Championship, a day before the NCAA cancelled March Madness due to the spread of COVID-19. 

Women’s basketball was the highest remaining seed in the MAC Championship after No. 2 Ball State fell to Eastern Michigan and No. 1 Central Michigan lost to Toledo. Just like that, redshirt senior Megan Carter’s final season at Kent State was over.

“I mean when we found out we were the highest remaining seed, we felt like we had the best chance to win it all,” Carter said in an interview with Kathryn Rajnicek. “Everything was just kind of set up in our favor a little bit. But I mean, it was just hard. It just left a lot of what ifs.”

Carter, who studied sociology, received an All-MAC honorable mention and became one of 22 players in Kent State history to score 1,000 points. 

After the cancellation of March Madness, the NCAA had yet to cancel the Division 1 Wrestling Championship. Around 4:30 p.m., redshirt senior Tim Rooney, an exercise size major, was driving to a teammate’s house to grab dinner. His phone blew up with tweets. 

20 minutes later, he received a text from his coach about the cancellation of the NCAA Wrestling Tournament.

“As soon as I pulled into his driveway I just read all this information; I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not good,’” Rooney said. 

Before the announcement of the cancellation, friends and teammates asked Rooney if he would be upset if they cancelled the tournament.  

“I wasn’t going to be upset if it gets canceled because it’s completely out of my hands,” he said.

Rooney finished his senior season 26-9. He had 13 dual wins for the Flashes and was the Mid-American Conference champion in weight class 133. Unlike Vodan, he was able to complete almost his entire senior season, except the NCAA Tournament.

This year the wrestling NCAA Tournament was supposed to compete in the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota — also where the Minnesota Vikings play. Rooney was set to take on Devan Turner from Oregon State.

In the 2018-2019 season, Rooney received an automatic-bid to the NCAA Tournament. That season, he competed at the PPG Paints Arena — where the Pittsburgh Penguins play — in front of 20,000 fans. 

This year, the NCAA already announced there would be no fans at the tournament due to the coronavirus. 

“It’s just a whole different experience; like wrestling in PPG for nationals, the previous year was insane,” Rooney said. “That was the whole point of making the state tournament in high school. The Ohio State Tournament [was] massive; there’s 15,000 people there for the finals. To make it to go from a giant spectacle to every other wrestling training I’ve ever been at when there’s nobody there watching except for, like, your parents, it kind of ruined the whole premise of it.”

Sarah McCarty sat with her teammates in the gymnastics gym when coach Brice Biggin told the team the season was over. In the 2019 season McCarty had scored her career high with a 9.825 on vault and was on the Academic All-MAC Team. 

Kent State gymnastics’ senior night was the following day. McCarty would miss her senior night, the rest of the regular season and the MAC Championship. 

McCarty, a human development and family studies major, will still be around Kent for the Flashes’ next season. She’ll join the team as a coach, while she completes grad school at Kent State. 

Before the Flashes’ season began, Kent State softball was second in polling to win the Mid-American Conference and first in votes to win the MAC Championship (tied with Miami with five votes). 

Until the season was canceled because of COVID-19, the Flashes were 9-10 and had yet to start MAC play. Kent State had played some of the top softball teams in the country including No. 9 Florida State, No. 20 Texas Tech and No. 21 University of Arkansas. 

Vodan was looking forward to playing against her friends one last time. Her former high school teammates played for Bowling Green and Ohio University. 

“I really, really wanted to win another ring this year with the girls.”

Amanda Levine is a sports editor. Contact her at [email protected].