Plenty of talk surrounded Michigan and St. Lawrence earlier this year, when COVID-19 cases saw those teams withdraw from the 2021 NCAA tournament before it began.
Those moves soon became public information. What wasn’t public at the time of the Frozen Four in Pittsburgh, though, was that St. Cloud State briefly worried over a false positive test on the morning of the Huskies’ national championship game against Massachusetts.
In an interview Tuesday with USCHO, St. Cloud State coach Brett Larson said the Huskies’ players and staff for this season are fully vaccinated. What happened in the hours before SCSU’s 5-0 defeat to UMass hadn’t been forgotten.
“For an hour or 45 minutes, while they were doing the second (polymerase chain reaction, or PCR) test, our whole team was living that fear of it potentially ruining your season,” Larson recalled. “Thankfully, it turned out to be a false positive, but I think everybody remembers the fear of not having the opportunity to play in that game.
“I think maybe that carried over to us this (season), where we want to do everything we possibly could to make sure we can play. (The false positive) wasn’t public at the time. They test you every morning, and they tested us on the morning of the national championship game, and one of the tests came back positive, but luckily there was protocol to do a second PCR test, and that came for us to know the first was a false positive, but I’ll tell you what, that player was sitting there 45 minutes, sweating.
“Can you imagine the pressure on that player, to think that maybe he was the one that potentially could cost the team the season?”
Just any team might have been thinking all season.
“I think the untold story is the anxiety that, every week, three times a week, a kid was feeling like he could cost, through no fault of his own, his team the ability to play that weekend. That was a lot of stress on those kids last year.
“We never blamed the kids, unless we’d find out they had gone to a party or done something different, which our guys didn’t, but they could do everything right and still get (COVID-19), and they were all sweating out those tests every week, not wanting to be a guy who costs their team the opportunity to play.”
As for having the Huskies vaccinated, Larson feels that NHL teams’ initiatives helped. Also, shortly after SCSU’s 2021 fall semester began, a representative from a local hospital system was invited in to discuss the vaccine with the Huskies.
“We didn’t try to twist anybody’s arm, and I felt a little uncomfortable about that, but we tried to get as much education as we could, and let them make their own decision,” Larson said. “Fortunately for us, the guys were willing to do that.
“At that time (of the meeting with the hospital representative), we probably still had about a third of the team that maybe wasn’t vaccinated yet, and maybe one or two staff members, but through the education part of it and, let’s be honest, it’s the fact that we wanted to do the best we could to protect our season, I think those two things motivated the guys and the staff to get it done.”
Larson got vaccinated early in the summer, ahead of a recruiting trip to Europe that he had been considering but, in the end, didn’t take.
“There’s always that little feeling of the unknown, and has there been enough research and that type of thing,” Larson said, when asked if he had any concerns about getting the vaccine.
“But, the way I look at it, when you talk to the team doctors and you talk to the people in the hospital system, and they’re professionals in that field, I guess I feel like they know a lot more about it than I do. That’s what gave me some comfort to do it. You know what, if they want to ask me about a power play, I can tell them, because maybe doctors don’t know, but when it comes to medical stuff, I’m going to trust the doctors more than my own opinion.”
Larson knows that breakthrough cases of COVID-19 are still possible for those that are vaccinated. Still, his team is doing its part to try and stop the streak of pandemic-affected college hockey seasons at three.
“There’s still always that worry (about breakthrough cases) in the back of your mind, but I think also there is that feeling like, as long as you’ve been vaccinated, and as long as you’re being as smart as you can to avoid real large crowds and not putting yourselves in certain situations, I just don’t know how much else you can do at this point,” Larson said.
“I feel that if you can control what you can control, then at least your worries are a little bit less.”
