INDIANAPOLIS — Has it really been five years since COVID caved in on the NCAA tournament? True. Five years ago this very Wednesday. March 12, 2020, the day that left college basketball in shock and pain and darkness.
As league tournaments were canceled coast to coast and the situation grew dire by the minute, the NCAA Basketball Committee meeting in New York for its annual selection process realized it had no choice but to pull the plug. That was a Thursday and the pandemic had sent the globe into a panic. Nothing was immune. NCAA Vice President of Men’s Basketball JoAn Scott will never forget when the decision was reached. “It was 12:28 p.m,” she said. “We wrote down 12:28 and we will honor that every year in the selection room. That’s what I remember the most, is the time, because I thought it was historic for future committees. I just remember it being like, is this really happening? Are we really canceling this tournament?”
They were. And the heartbreak rolled over the sport like a tsunami.
Which brings us to Tuesday night, almost exactly five years later, and the coach at Robert Morris watching his players celebrate having just earned a spot in March Madness. This one won’t be taken away.
CHAMPIONS!!! 👏🏆 #LetsGoBobbyMo pic.twitter.com/9AAE9mBp3r
— Robert Morris University (@RMU) March 12, 2025
The Colonials ran past Youngstown State 89-78 to win the Horizon League. Then came the enchanted looks on the faces you only see in college basketball in March. Toole was so proud of his players.
Just as he was on March 10, 2020.
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Robert Morris was in the Northeast Conference then — the Colonials were scheduled to move to the Horizon League the following year — and had just beaten Saint Francis 77-67 to win the NEC tournament. What a going-away present. Places such as Robert Morris and coaches such as Andy Toole cherish any NCAA tournament, because bids don’t happen every year. They’re not Kansas. Actually, Toole had played in two for Penn and been an assistant or head coach at Robert Morris for three, so he knew how great the experience would be. He wanted it most for his players.
There is a photo from that night of Robert Morris player Yannis Mendy holding up the NEC trophy, surrounded by thick throngs of fans. Only days later such a scene would be unimaginable. On the school website was a notice that there would be a viewing party for Selection Sunday with free NEC championship T-shirts. A happy time.
The title game had been at Robert Morris and Toole’s wife Brooke remembers how “we went out and celebrated. We had no inkling. It was the day after, that’s when the world started to shut down.”
Five years. Toole stood Tuesday amid another celebration by another team and recalled how quickly a dream became a nightmare. “What’s funny is I consider myself a pretty well-read person and for some reason six weeks before that championship I got off all social media. So I really didn’t know a whole lot about what was going on and I didn’t think anything about it.”
He certainly knew there was a pandemic. But had it gotten this bad, this fast? The next day would show how bad, and how fast.
“We started getting calls from some other coaches as games were getting canceled and then we started to get concerned,” Brooke said. She remembers her husband on the phone with an athletic department official, being told that perhaps the tournament would be played but with no fans. “And he was like, well `try to keep my wife and my family out of Dayton.’ Because obviously we thought we were going to go to Dayton (for the First Four).”
But nobody ended up going anywhere. The end came that Thursday. Toole called his team together the next morning, the kids who 60 hours earlier had savored one of the best moments of their young lives.
“The hardest locker room I’ve ever walked into in my life was when we met and knew the tournament was canceled,” he said. “The hard part was it goes out on Twitter, the whole team knows about it, you can’t control the narrative, you can’t do anything to be able to soften the blow. We met that Friday morning and you walk in and it was like a morgue.
“They were sitting there completely devastated. Then we all got sent home (as the campus closed because of the virus). So it wasn’t even like we could grieve together.”
He and his wife had gone to the house of some close friends to try to process the news. “We were just sitting there and talking about it for hours,” Brooke said. “How could this happen and how could you work so hard and then not able to play on the biggest stage you can ever experience from a college basketball perspective?
“We had brothers on our team, Jon and Josh Williams who were incredible, and to not be able to see them play together in the NCAA tournament was a really hard thing for Andy to have to tell them.”
Five years later, even with the excitement of a return to the tournament, Toole still feels for what that team lost.
“I really wanted them to hear their name called on Selection Sunday, be a part of the greatest tournament in college athletics or maybe sports in general. So when you don’t see that come to fruition and you’ve earned it, you won, it was a killer for those guys. I’ve had more opportunities to come back and try to do it again. These guys only have a short amount of time to do it. So when you get it in your hands and it gets taken from you it’s heartbreaking.”
His current players were in high school back then so did not see the torment up close. Toole said a few members of the 2020 team have spoken to this one, but more about what’s needed to win a league title, not what they lost.
“We haven’t talked about it specifically. It’s a different year, it’s a different journey,” Toole said. “It’s not like — hopefully not — we’re ever going to experience that again.”
The immediate aftermath of 2020 was difficult for him and his program. The move to the Horizon League came with growing pains, especially with recruiting hampered at the start by the pandemic. Robert Morris went 4-15 the next year, the first of four consecutive losing seasons. The Colonials were 10-22 a year ago.
But they’re back in a big way, winning the Horizon season title and then — as members of one-bid leagues must do — forgetting all that to take the conference tournament. They’ll carry a 26-8 record and 10-game winning streak into the NCAA tournament.
“It’s indescribable,” Toole said of the pressure in a league tournament when there is no safety net of an NCAA at-large bid. “Literally the first game against Wright State you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. You want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to prepare these guys, keep them balanced, not get too emotional. Dodged a bullet last night against Oakland (79-76 in overtime in the Horizon semis). I think there’s always a bullet you’ve got to dodge to get to a championship.”
But now they have one. And this time they can plan a watch party and be confident it’ll happen.
Still, how long did it take for Andy Toole to get over the Robert Morris trip to the Big Dance that never came?
In the glow of a punched ticket Tuesday night, his wife Brooke pondered the question.
“Probably till today.”
