03: Timeline.
How did we get here?
Staying on the gas has been great for productivity and mental health over the last few months, but I’m admittedly forgetting things that have happened. Might help to have a quick and dirty breakdown of this blur of a year.
Providing a behind-the-scenes look of recent work or detailed narrative from home life – the participation trophy pictured to the left is named Wes! – probably wouldn’t be professional or unique. A memoir would be the most boring way to spoil a fresh blog.
Let’s try a personal timeline to jog my memory and be a useful exercise for making sense out of a whirlwind 2020. If past is prologue, this story starts on the last day of last year.
T and I found out she was pregnant on December 31, 2019 a couple hours after arriving home from a quick hiking trip to Ozark National Forest in Arkansas. We were pitching around ideas for last-minute New Year’s Eve plans and potentially available drinking buddies before our jaws dropped and we opted for a quiet movie night. It was an appropriate kickoff for the craziest year of our lives.
Before I dive in, I’d like to clearly reiterate what I hope has come through in my first two posts: I am writing this as a safe, healthy, employed, and empowered man in America. Everything is awesome. This is especially true in a turbulent year for friends, family, neighbors, and my community. Any bragging, complaining, or overanalyzing should be viewed through that relative lens from here on out. Readers are free to mentally attach #blessed to my posts.
Now, my rough 2020 timeline…
January
Life: We were equal parts terrified and thrilled to find out T’s pregnancy tests were correct and that we were expecting a baby! Then we learned the doctors don’t see you for a few weeks. And that telling anyone outside your marriage about your pregnancy in the first trimester is a faux pas and taboo and dooms you to an afterlife of watching neighbors come oh so close to pulling down their Christmas lights in May but just not doing it.
In all seriousness, the secrecy phenomenon was strange. There are so many legitimate reasons why personal pregnancy news shouldn’t be announced or thrown in someone’s face, but keeping it completely hush felt unnatural and occasionally unhealthy. Good thing we could take solace in a doctor confirming we were indeed pregnant in another couple months!
Travel: A weekend trip to Amsterdam over MLK weekend was obviously planned before the pregnancy news. We also had no idea it would be the last daylight our passports would see for some time. T adjusted our flights to beat the weather (DSM, ORD, IAD, AMS) and it was a fantastic 72 hours in the Netherlands.
February
Work: Looking back, it’s surreal that this was a “normal” busy season. Our winter tournaments completely occupy my Februarys each year, with state swimming in Iowa City (Feb. 15) leading into the extravaganza that is state wrestling in Des Moines (Feb. 19-22) and closing out with state bowling in Waterloo (Feb. 24-26). These are all-encompassing events for me. Between media relations, award presentations, standard event management, my communications role, and even public address duties at bowling, there is little sleep and home life, but I still enjoy that grind.
March
Work: Our state basketball tournament ran March 9-13 at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines. It was likely my wildest week of work ever. It also served as an indicator of what was to come in the time of COVID-19. We jam 32 games into five days for our state basketball tournament, so the week began as it has the last two years – non-stop hoops. It began tearing at the seams on Wednesday, as the world, but more importantly for me the sports world, was set ablaze by coronavirus. The games rolled on as we strategized and tried to put on a good face for each new crowd and question. Other state high school associations were making tough but varied decisions as professional and collegiate sports came to an abrupt halt. By Thursday morning, we knew we were close to our championships but also up against it.
I was fortunate to constantly be included in the decision-making process of this week, and while hindsight allows for endless armchair quarterbacking, I know how much work and wrangling went into restricting crowds for Friday’s finals. We made the best decision we could with the information we had available. Looking back six months later – and seeing the strategy and organization of national, state, and local response – that wasn’t much. The championship games were played. We wound up holding one of the last live sporting events in the country on March 13. Spring sports had to press pause the next week.
Life: After the tournament, T and I digested what was going on and tried to read as much as we could. We both were in the office the next week, but gradually shifted home as workplaces across the country shutdown. Work From Home (WFH) life was beginning. And it involved so many Zoom calls and surprises to come. A quick renovation in our upstairs and kitchen finally gets completed with new counters and paint to enjoy while we’re stationary.
April
Life: Love is asking your spouse to permanently leave a room and receiving complete agreement and understanding. T and I dove headfirst into WFH life as I moved to the office and she set up shop on the living room couches. Both our jobs involve plenty of working the phones, and coronavirus constantly threw new wrenches into the already stressful process of work. We settled into avoiding restaurants and races and events, even though those are our favorite things to do, and canceled trips to Washington D.C. (her) and Lexington, Kentucky (me). We started Zooming family members. I began gardening. And we tried figuring out what was going to happen next as we watched 2020 melting down.
Work: It started with a suspension on April 3 that was supposed to run through the end of the month. Our four spring sports – golf, soccer, tennis, and track and field – had been halted in March, but now were in limbo indefinitely as schools statewide were closed. The problems we had faced in the fall and winter seemed miniscule compared to getting kids back to school and then back to competition. Complaints about private schools and shot clocks and ideas on how and why the IHSAA, a non-profit sports organization with 13 employees, should solve income inequality across in Iowa seemed silly. Then it went sour: We announced on April 17 that all four of those spring sports and our student programs would be canceled entirely as (important bit here, dear angry anonymous reader) state government announced school for 2019-20 was being canceled entirely. After weeks of work on contingency plans and cooperating with our counterparts at the IGHSAU and taking every incoming media request, it was over. It felt like a letdown for those kids and teams, even if my rational brain knew the virus set the schedule.
May
Life: WFH continues. Garage workouts and gardening are breaking up the days. Weddings and showers and weekend commitments keep canceling, freeing up our May schedule for the first time in years as we have nowhere to go and nothing to do. Everything outside of work hours, including the assembly of a nursery, is an effort to distract myself from work and school.
Work: Endless discussions, daily briefings from the governor, and no definitives to offer any of the emails and calls I get. At least I’m getting the coachspeak down? The mood goes from despondent to in-gear in the span of a week as I’ve prepared releases for every result and (stunningly) end up using “Summer Sports Return” on May 20. It was a surprise until the baseball and softball go-ahead came out of the governor’s mouth in the middle of a regular press conference. It also gave us less than two weeks until the start of practice to create and get coronavirus guidance approved. While I’m fielding football questions and parent messages wondering what we’re going to do with wrestling eight months away, we didn’t know what was going to happen when we logged in each day.
School: I started my grad school program last fall and I’m starting to feel the heat in getting it knocked out. Especially in paying for it out of pocket and with a baby on the way. Final exams and presentations were in the first couple weeks of May, then I get greedy and sign up for 12 credits (four classes) in a summer semester in which I should be available. Until I find out there’s going to be a baseball season. I drop one class and sit tight for 10 days until the start of summer classes.
June
Life: WFH life wrapped up for me as T continued plowing through cases from the couch. Usual summer activities like races, weekend trips, and weddings are long gone. We host a surprise party – outdoors, time staggered and socially distanced – for T for a professional accomplishment and it’s a relief to see family and some friends in-person. It’s also likely the last time we’ll see most these folks in a public setting as a two-person unit.
Work: Sports are back! But only high school baseball and softball. And only in Iowa. And almost nothing else is in action anywhere except for professional leagues abroad. The discussions and deliberations about playing are endless. But the season starts with practice on June 1 and games on June 15 and it is only the tip of the iceberg on the philosophical considerations of sports, school sports, and youth sports in a pandemic. Media everywhere agrees. Among the local requests and considerations across Iowa, I’m navigating stories with ESPN, NBC News, USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, etc. It’s more crisis management, but three months into COVID-19 life there are still more questions than answers.
July
School: OK, so nine credits in a shortened summer session during a pandemic might have been a little bold. Especially when work is as wild and unique as it is. Homework is almost every night of the week and I’m just trying to stay one assignment ahead. I’m often reminded of a paraphrased life lesson: Being an adult is doing the stuff you don’t want to do. And knocking this out will put me nine credits from completing the program. I get through finals and presentations from the outfield seats at our state baseball tournament and preserve my 4.0. (Humblebrag clarification: Anyone who knew me at any other point in my education will know how uncharacteristic that GPA seems.)
Work: It happened, somehow. Whether the 2020 high school baseball season in Iowa was a success or failure is up to those who actually participated, but the unlikely summer was completed on schedule and without any reported crises beyond a dozen teams having to end their seasons in coronavirus-related quarantines. There were still challenges without clean solutions, like teams being sidelined, a race-related incident between “fans” and a Black player, and endless questions from schools and media members on how to handle protocols and policies in an unprecedented season. We still got to a patchwork state tournament at Principal Park in Des Moines, where spectator limitations, a completely revamped fall football schedule plan, a player getting locked in the dugout bathroom (yes, really), and a last-minute mayor’s proclamation on crowd sizes could have stolen the show before we got to the August 1 title games. We got there. It was nuts, it was nonstop, and it may look different in hindsight, but I’m proud of the work I completed and setup in July.
Life: lol
August
Work: The baseball championships wrapped up on August 1 and it was all fall sports planning after that. Schedules that are usually known for months and even years in advance were thrown in the blender for our three fall sports – cross country, football, and golf – and that created a whole new set of concerns and questions. I got to help devise new competition formats, health and safety guidelines, and state tournament considerations, all on short notice and within the invisible boundaries of the organization. There were complications, as always. Student transfers, varying virus protocols, scheduling, and virtual learning all became centerpiece storylines. We’ll never know how “right” all the changes were, but I can say it made all those pre-pandemic concerns seem even smaller in perspective.
Life: I was ready for a deep exhale following baseball, especially since I had been isolating as a precautionary measure in the basement for 10 days during the tournament. I wanted to try harder to keep work at work. We were approaching crunch time for the nursery and planning and preparing for our new teammate. But being ready for a break and getting a break are two different things.
T tested positive for COVID-19 on August 3. She was asymptomatic, but 35 weeks pregnant. We were tested because of my possible exposures with crowds at state baseball. I continued testing negative. We were confounded and frustrated and concerned after she had been so cautious, and we were so close to meeting our baby. Isolation for us continued. Then a derecho hit Iowa on August 10. We were safe and our home was generally fine – new roof still on-deck! – but power was out for a couple days and Internet for a week. The in-laws graciously allowed us use of one of their generators, so the emergency home time got a little more comfortable. But when you get to celebrate your second wedding anniversary at French Laundry, breakfast tacos on the grill with power outages was not how we envisioned our third. And yet, the moral of this entire story, is that we got through it all. Together. We were fine. We are fine. We’ve rarely felt more prepared to roll with the punches. Which is good, because, y’know…
September
Life: We said hello to our son on September 5. It has been a phenomenal two weeks of being present and being a dad. I’m excited to continue this timeline offline.
If you made it this far, thank you. If you’d like to drop a line, please feel free to hit the Contact page in the top corner for the email of your choice. I’ll work on posting more frequently, but I’ve been a little busy, OK? Cheers.
