If it weren’t for the COVID-19 pandemic, half of the 2024-25 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team would have already been out in the real world instead of playing college hoops this winter.
The journeys that brought Frank Champion, Garrison Keeslar, Jack Kostel and Bash Wieland to UTC — and allowed Trey Bonham to complete his career with the Mocs — are indicative of broader changes in college athletics, though.
When the pandemic led to the shutdown of so many aspects of everyday life in March 2020, the casualties of the athletic world included that year’s NCAA Division I basketball tournaments for men and women and spring sports, with the latter teams early in their seasons. By the end of the month, the NCAA had announced that spring sports athletes would receive an extra season of eligibility; in October, the governing body made a similar announcement for winter sports athletes who would compete in the 2020-21 season, with fall athletes having already received the extension.
Champion, Keeslar, Kostel and Wieland all joined the Mocs as transfers in the most recent offseason and Bonham ahead of the 2023-24 season, but without what’s been commonly referred to as the “COVID year” of extra eligibility, each would have been done before this season.
“I’d be working somewhere. I don’t know where,” Keeslar, who studied data analytics at Walsh University, said last Saturday after scoring a season-high 19 points in UTC’s win against Mercer in the Southern Conference tournament quarterfinals.