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Chuck Wilbur’s been at Onondaga Community College for two decades. In previous years, Wilbur saw OCC basketball players more than once a day, strolling through the campus or walking down hallways. As OCC’s retention coordinator, Wilbur helps athletes off the court, supporting their academic life and guiding their progress to four-year schools.

This year, though, Wilbur has barely seen the players in the hallways. OCC canceled its season in December due to the pandemic, and even with in-person classes available, most of the basketball players stayed home. 

“I would say more than 3/4 of the team didn’t return right now because there’s no athletics,” Wilbur said. “There’s only a few guys that are actually here, that were here last spring, that returned to school.”

For head coach Erik Saroney’s men’s basketball program, COVID-19 has been detrimental. Players such as Maurice Coney and Christian Rossi lost a year of basketball and potential looks from four-year schools. Athletes have struggled academically without their sport to keep them motivated, administrators and players said. And without a season, assistants such as Keith Tyson weren’t rehired and, as a result, have faced financial difficulties during the ongoing pandemic. 

“COVID’s been devastating. Absolutely devastating,” OCC’s Athletic Director Michael Borsz said. 

For a program as accomplished as OCC’s — with Saroney manning the helm — the shutdown and loss of a season was frustrating, Tyson and Borsz said. The Lazers have won 20 or more games and a conference championship in each of Saroney’s four seasons as head coach. Top-5 rankings have become customary. But there was no 2020-2021 season for the NJCAA powerhouse, and there are no guarantees that there will be a season next year. 

Saroney continues to recruit his future players and teach physical education remotely at Grant Middle School, located nearby, but his current players don’t know what their next steps as students and athletes will look like. 

Coney, a sophomore guard, plans to attend SUNY Brockport this fall and is unsure if his plans will include basketball, while Rossi said his future is still “up in arms.” 

For second-year players looking to move on to a four-year school, the future is foggy because of a reduced number of games limiting their highlight reels, Wilbur said. The NCAA granted an additional year of eligibility that many Division I, II and III athletes took advantage of, leaving a “backlog” that has reduced the need for junior college transfers.

Along with the uncertainty of their futures, some players have struggled to maintain their grades over recent semesters. Rossi and Coney said the GPA requirement associated with eligibility during the season motivated some of their teammates to work harder in the classroom. Without that requirement, some players have struggled.

“A lot of my teammates don’t want to go back to school or haven’t been back to school because there’s no season,” Coney said. “It definitely hurts.”

For athletes that Wilbur works closely with, OCC has always opened doors that “had been shut previously” due to a difficult upbringing or a poor high school experience. Seeing how the pandemic is impacting those students has been difficult, Wilbur said.

“(Sports are) the driving force why they go to college, a lot of times,” Wilbur said. “It saddens me because it’s affected our kids more than a lot of schools that are at the four-year level.”

When the sports seasons were canceled, Borsz knew OCC couldn’t rehire any assistant coaches, including for basketball. They’re typically reappointed annually and serve one-year contracts, but this year, those contracts weren’t renewed. The assistant coaches don’t know when the renewals will restart, either. 

Most head and assistant coaches work other full-time jobs in addition to coaching at OCC. Despite serving as director of operations for a local nonprofit, the Near WestSide Initiative, before and during the pandemic, the lost assistant coaching job was significant for Tyson.

“It definitely hurt with paying the bills sometimes,” Tyson said. “I was already relying on (the coaching job), but I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I had a primary job that was still up and running during COVID.”

Without a basketball season to coach for, Saroney’s full-time teaching job at Grant has kept him occupied. He’s slowly begun to recruit players for next year’s team, but the uncertainty of whether OCC will even see the court in 2021 has made it challenging. He doesn’t definitively know which current players will return, making it harder to sell OCC to a recruit. Sophomores who took the academic year off or have the option of returning to OCC aren’t guaranteed to return next season. 

Players from Onondaga Community College men’s basketball team haven’t played since the pandemic started. Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor

Saroney’s always been someone who plans out every detail, he said. COVID-19 has forced him — and OCC — to deal with adversity and adapt on the fly. Still, Saroney had no doubts that, once OCC does return to action, it’ll be the same NJCAA powerhouse team it was before the pandemic. 

“I don’t have any plans of this slowing us down,” Saroney said. “It took away this season, and I think we were primed to have a great season … but once we do get back on the floor, we’ll be as competitive as always and getting back to the brand of basketball that we like to play.”

Published on February 8, 2021 at 9:01 pm

Contact Connor: csmith49@syr.edu | @csmith17_