Five years ago, the VHSL basketball tournament ended with a secret meeting in the men’s room

The last time Lord Botetourt’s girls basketball team qualified for a Virginia High School League state championship game in Richmond, the trip ended before it began because of a meeting in the men’s bathroom at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center.

Present at that impromptu summit on March 12, 2020, were VHSL Executive Director Billy Haun, Associate Director Tom Dolan and Director of Communications Mike McCall.

The VHSL tournament was underway that Thursday afternoon with John Marshall High of Richmond playing Gate City in a Class 2 boys final with a noisy crowd inside the arena.

Outside the Siegel Center walls, other drama was unfolding.

The COVID-19 virus was crossing the country, and in the state capital, word was spreading that the remainder of the VHSL tournament — Class 3 and Class 4 boys and girls on Friday, and Class 5 and Class 6 boys and girls on Saturday — was in jeopardy of being canceled.

Lord Botetourt’s players and coaches were preparing to leave school en route to Richmond for their game the following day against Spotswood.

The wheels of the bus never rolled.

As fears of a potential COVID pandemic mounted, Gov. Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency in the Commonwealth.

The VHSL officials, who had made three separate decisions within a span of several hours whether to hold the annual basketball tournament, had no choice.

Expediency, convenience and the need for privacy and quiet forced Haun, Dolan and McCall to convene in the closest restroom.

The decision was made.

The remainder of the tournament was flushed.

“There were three summit meetings that took place in the bathroom of the Siegel Center,” Dolan recalled five years later. “It was devastatingly crazy.”

* * *

Lord Botetourt’s girls program won two VHSL state championships in the 1990s with head coach David Wheat, and the Cavaliers maintained a high level of success in the 2000s under the direction of Chuck Pound.

The Cavaliers reached the 2005 VHSL Group AA championship game, losing 52-45 to Spotswood. They reached state semifinals in 2006 and 2009 and made quarterfinal appearances in 2004 and 2013.

However, Pound eventually broke through at the Daleville school in 2017-2018 when he coached a team with a starting lineup that included no seniors to the Class 3 championship with a 53-45 victory over Hopewell, completing a 24-6 season. Saturday, Lord Botetourt returns to VCU for the 2025 Class 3 championship game against undefeated James Monroe High School of Fredericksburg.

Lord Botetourt’s 2019 team might have been better than the 2018 champions. The Cavaliers finished 27-2, losing only to William Fleming in the regular season and to nemesis Spotswood in a state quarterfinal. The Spotswood game was held at Eastern Mennonite University, where before the tipoff, Botetourt assistant coach Mark Driscoll helped tape a makeshift 3-point line on the floor because there was no high school arc painted on the college court.

With the return of two-time Roanoke Times Timesland player of the year Miette Veldman as a senior in 2020, Pound knew he had another team capable of a deep postseason run.

That’s one reason he turned the head coaching job over to Renee Favaro, who played for Pound before graduating in 2004 and served for eight seasons as a Cavaliers assistant coach.

Lord Botetourt sailed through most of the 2019-20 season. A 69-43 state semifinal victory over Booker T. Washington of Norfolk improved the Blue Ridge District team’s won-lost record to 25-3 and earned the Cavs a trip to Richmond.

Botetourt defeated Spotswood in the quarterfinals on the way to the 2018 state title, so when another collision with the Shenandoah Valley powerhouse loomed at VCU on that fateful March day two years later, it was must-see basketball.

* * *

The first recorded case of COVID-19 in Virginia was March 7, when a U.S. Marine at Fort Belvoir tested positive.

The first COVID-related death in the state was a week later on March 14 when a 70-year-old man died of respiratory failure.

The day before the VHSL basketball tournament was to begin, there were seven reported cases of COVID in the state, two in Virginia Beach, two in Fairfax, one in Arlington, one in Loudoun County and one in Spotsylvania County.

Haun was driving back to Charlottesville from Richmond after attending the biannual VHSL meetings with concerns as the coronavirus was spreading through the nation’s consciousness. He made an uneasy phone call to VHSL legal counsel Craig Wood.

Would seven COVID cases cause the cancellation of 12 state championship games?

“On the way home, I called [Wood] and said, ‘What do you think?'” Haun recalled. “Basically we decided it was [seven] cases. They weren’t in the Richmond area. At that point, we didn’t have any teams [playing] from [Northern Virginia].

 “So we both felt like we were good moving forward and playing the tournament.”

 That same day, outside forces were moving faster.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, minutes before regular-season champion Florida State was to take the court at Greensboro Coliseum, the Atlantic Coast Conference made the stunning announcement that it was canceling the remainder of the men’s basketball tournament that had begun the previous day.

The Big East Conference canceled the rest of its tournament at halftime of a game in New York’s Madison Square Garden between St. John’s and Creighton.

Other conference tournaments — the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 — fell like dominoes.

Then later that day came even bigger news.

The NCAA canceled its men’s and women’s basketball championships.

On March 13, NASCAR and the National Hockey League put their seasons on hold. The Masters golf tournament postponed its annual spring event.

What was happening? A tradition like no other. True March madness.

* * *

While lights were turned off and doors closed in arenas across the country, the VHSL state tournament began March 12 with Gate City’s girls defeating Luray 64-54 in Thursday’s first game.

The boys game between Gate City and John Marshall tipped off, but by then, the VHSL was already in the process of making changes to the tournament.

The initial decision was to play the Thursday evening games in Class 2 — Honaker vs. Surry County (girls) and Auburn vs. Mathews (boys) — with spectators in the arena. The eight Friday and Saturday finals, including Lord Botetourt’s Class 3 girls game against Spotswood, would be played with parents of players as the only spectators allowed.

Hours later, the VHSL canceled the Friday and Saturday games.

Shortly thereafter, the VHSL shut down the entire tournament as John Marshall was finishing a 75-57 victory. The teams that were already in Richmond for Thursday night games were sent home.

“The first report we got that there were some things released from the Virginia Department of Health about some [safeguards] getting ready to be put in place,” Haun said. “The first decision was we would go ahead and play [March 12] games as scheduled because the teams were already there, the fans were already there … even though people were getting a little more wary about what was going on.”

“We made the decision early Thursday morning that for Friday and Saturday the schools were going to have to send us a roster, and we were only going to allow parents and teams in. Then we said, Friday and Saturday are out. We’ll finish [Thursday’s four games] and then we’re done.

“In a short while, before that game was over we learned that the governor had declared a state of emergency so we convened to the bathroom again. At that point, we decided that if the governor has declared a state of emergency then we just need to stop. We can’t go any further. It was probably within the hour that we decided that we were done.”

Some of the Class 1 teams scheduled to play on that Thursday were already inside Siegel Center, either to watch the early games or prepare for their night session.

While McCall cranked out media releases, Dolan, the designated VHSL representative for basketball, had the job of personally giving the teams and schools involved the bad news.

“That was probably one of the worst duties I had while I was at the league office,” he recalled this week. “Absolutely an awful, awful situation.”

Honaker High’s girls team made the long trip from Russell County for an opportunity to play a game in the 7,600-seat Siegel Center. The Tigers attended the Thursday morning session before going back to their hotel to prepare for the game.

Honaker coach Misty Davis Miller was aware of potential trouble.

“We were nervous. We actually checked before we left the [arena] to make sure everything was still on pace and we were going to get to play,” Miller said. 

“They told us at that point that everything was good. So we went back to the room [to return to VCU]. I was packing up my stuff, and I heard someone at the door, and my heart just sunk. I figured that’s what it was. Our principal, Mr. [Tony] Bush, he told us he just got the call.

“I brought all the girls down to the lobby and told them. To see the look on their faces … that’ll never leave my mind.”

Auburn’s boys team learned its fate in a more indirect way. The Eagles were perched in the upper reaches of the arena watching the early Thursday games when they were told by concession workers packing up gear that the tournament was canceled.

The players and coaches got on a bus and made the trek back to Montgomery County.

* * *

Miette Veldman and Meredith Wells were in class at Lord Botetourt on March 12, 2020, preparing to board a bus to Richmond with their teammates.

After winning the championship in 2018, the novelty of the situation had faded. The Cavaliers’ veterans had their focus on a familiar opponent.

“We were wanting to play Spotswood,” Wells said. “We kind of had a history with them.”

Veldman made plenty of history at Lord Botetourt. She led the school to three Class 3 volleyball championships before signing a scholarship with James Madison. She also finished as Botetourt’s all-time basketball scoring and rebounding leader.

The career of one of the Roanoke Valley’s greatest two-sport athletes was about to come to an end, just a bit sooner than she expected thanks to a raging virus.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, it won’t get that bad,'” she recalled. “It took a little bit for me to understand that it was as big as it was.”

Reality reared its ugly head.

“I remember them making an announcement that all girls basketball players had to meet in the team room in the locker room,” Wells said.

Pound, who remained Lord Botetourt’s athletic director after retiring with exactly 400 coaching victories, called Favaro from Richmond with the bad news. 

“When I called I said, ‘You probably know why I’m calling,'” Pound recalled. “She said, ‘I don’t want to hear it.'”

The first-year Botetourt coach delivered the message to the stunned teens. Twenty miles south, Cave Spring’s boys basketball team was in the same boat. Just as the Knights were preparing for a bus trip to Richmond, they were told their Class 3 game in Richmond against Lakeland was scrubbed.

“We were like, ‘What? Of all games, you’ve canceled the state championship?'” Wells said.

Veldman recalled the emotional day five years later.

“We were all in the locker room just crying and trying to console each other,” she said. “We had a group of seniors who got together like an ‘It’s going to be OK’ thing. I can’t remember if we went back to class or not.”

In the midst of disappointment, Favaro made a high-class move.

With no game to play, the coach had the team take the court together one last time. With the blessing of the school administration, with a proviso to “keep it short,” she organized a final “practice” on their home court at Lord Botetourt with the girls’ family members in the bleachers.

“I looked at them and said, ‘OK, here’s what we can do. We can all go home and sulk or we can get on the court together one last time,'” Favaro said. “We put on a little show in front of their parents, and we let them do an intrasquad [scrimmage]. We played some games and ate some ice cream and tried to let them have a little bit of a moment.”

* * *

Two years from the date of the state’s first record case of COVID-19 in March 2020, the Virginia Department of Health reported 1.64 million cases of the coronavirus statewide, 47,594 hospitalizations and 19,060 COVID-related deaths.

On March 23, Northam ordered that all schools in Virginia be closed for the remainder of the school year.

The 2020 VHSL spring sports season was scheduled to begin on March 18 — the Monday following the state basketball tournament — but prep baseball, softball, lacrosse, soccer, tennis and track and field were canceled.

Haun recalled a 2020 conversation he had with a Department of Education liaison about the VHSL calendar.

“I remember him saying, ‘Billy, you need to start thinking about what you’re going to do if schools don’t open in the fall,'” Haun said. “‘Spring’s out. Stop thinking about it.’ We just really didn’t understand the ramifications. We closed the office. We worked from home [until May 1].

“The governor’s office assigned us our own liaison for questions and input. We had a direct line to the Department of Health. We had conversations with the state superintendent. We spent a lot of time making new friends, but at the point it was clear that we weren’t going to have sports.”

Eventually, the VHSL postponed its fall sport seasons to the winter and spring of 2021. Sports that were contested had reduced schedules, and many used COVID mitigation measures for practices and games.

Additionally, not all of the VHSL’s school divisions chose to play sports. Some divisions played a handful of games, choosing not to compete for championships. State titles were contested at high school facilities with limited attendance.

“It was a great cooperative effort,” Haun said. “That’s when we formed coach advisory groups for every sport. We got feedback from them about how to safely play our sports. None of that would have gotten done without complete transparency and a team effort from everybody.”

While Virginia postponed its 2020 football season until March and April of 2021, neighboring states held their fall sports as usual. So while athletes at Virginia High in Bristol, for instance, were sitting idle, their counterparts at Tennessee High across the state line were competing.

“The divisions that were on the border with other states … Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, they were playing,” Haun said. “That was hard on our school divisions. But nobody [representing a school] called up and said, ‘Damn, this has got to stop.'”

Haun was a head football coach at George Wythe, Richlands, Caroline and Western Albemarle high schools before being named chief academic officer for the state DOE.

He is retiring from his VHSL post effective July 1.

The Shenandoah County native’s feelings about COVID involve more than the impact on high school athletics.

“To stop high school sports, that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve been involved in in my 45 years,” Haun said. “While there were people that were sad that we didn’t play, I feel very comfortable saying that the large majority of people felt like it was the right thing to do.

“I think we’re still feeling the ramifications, and we will for a while, on student learning. Not just Virginia, the country. You’re trying to teach kindergarten, first- and second-grade kids online how to read. The data on reading has been clear for years. Once you finish the third grade, if you’re behind, it’s hard to catch up.” 

* * *

The VHSL determined that the 20 teams that had their state basketball finals canceled would be declared co-champions.

Veldman, who was named the Colonial Athletic Association volleyball player of the year as a sophomore and a first-team All-Sun Belt Conference choice as a junior at JMU, said it took time to accept the shared title.

“It didn’t feel like it at first,” said Veldman, who graduated in December with a degree in business management and now lives in Charlotte. “It didn’t feel like we’d earned it in a sense. But as we realized the extent of COVID, we realized it was just a super unlucky situation and we could still be grateful to be split champions. There could have been no winner.”

The lens of time changes perspectives.

Despite losing her senior season of softball in high school, Wells signed a softball scholarship at James Madison and spent two years in Harrisonburg before transferring to Elon University in North Carolina.

Like Veldman, Wells got a fifth year of NCAA eligibility because COVID limited their freshman seasons at JMU in 2020-21. Wells graduated from Elon with a degree in public health and a double minor in biology and psychology. She has been admitted to Virginia Tech’s counseling program with an eye on specializing in clinical mental health.

While at JMU, Wells was rocked by the tragic suicide of teammate Lauren Bernett, who was the Dukes’ starting catcher. Wells said the tragedy shaped her course of study and perhaps the rest of her life.

“That played a huge role,” she said. “After that happened I had to take a step back. Sports is not who you are. It’s something you do. Just being an athlete, you fail a lot. Just knowing that you’re going to overcome failure no matter what is important.

“At the end of the day, why did you start playing when you were young? Because you had fun. Because you got to make new friends. When you get to college it becomes really, really competitive and so much is involved.”

* * *

The high school athletes who had the 2020 state tournament rug pulled out from under their feet were younger and less worldly five years ago than they are today. Looking back at 2020 is now done with clearer vision.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Favaro said. “I don’t think any of us knew. To us, it was just the start of the pandemic. We didn’t know how serious is this. I think if we could all turn back time, maybe even the state would want us to play this game.

“It seemed a little quick, but you don’t know what you don’t know. Nobody knew what COVID was going to bring, or how it was going to affect people. It was just this big, scary thing at the time.

“When it’s a state of emergency, there was nothing we could do. I don’t know that anybody was mad. Everybody was understanding of the situation. We were just a little sad, because a couple [teams] got to play and it was, ‘Oh, if [the tournament] had just been a week earlier.'”

Several teams that were denied in 2020 have gained retribution.

Honaker’s co-championship started a three-year run of Class 1 girls titles, 2021 on their home court and 2022 in Richmond.

Auburn and Cave Spring also returned to win VHSL boys championships in Richmond in 2022.

At 11 a.m. Saturday, Lord Botetourt hopes its time has come.  

“There were a lot of tears and a lot of disappointment [in 2020], because going to VCU was such an experience, win or lose,” Favaro said. It’s a ‘court memory’ for these kids for a lifetime.

“Barring anything crazy, we will get to do that this week.”