Hello Bulldogs Fans,

All of us in the Drake athletics department extend our thoughts to you during this unprecedented time. Potentially now more than ever, we are grateful for the support and well wishes many of you have shared with our student-athletes, coaches, and staff. I wanted to take a moment and send this message that hopefully provides a glimpse of what we have experienced, what we are currently dealing with, and what our plan is for our athletics department.
 
The past few weeks on our campus have been truly remarkable. The conversations that transpired within our athletics department and the Missouri Valley Conference from March 12-14 when we decided to cancel the women's basketball tournament and later the spring sports season were painful to participate in because we knew what those activities meant to our student-athletes and coaches. To be sure, those decisions – along with the postponement of the Drake Relays – were absolutely the correct call to make.  No one disputes it. But the pain and sense of loss, frustration and disappointment felt by members of our Bulldogs family is not something any administrator can easily remedy.
 
On the other end of the emotional spectrum, being part of our Emergency Operations Center at Drake these last few weeks has been an incredibly rewarding experience. As remarkable of a situation that led to the EOC convening was, the response by my campus colleagues has been incredibly uplifting. Our daily briefings have brought leaders together across campus with the common goal of making decisions that are in the best interests of our students, faculty and staff.
 
We have 370 student-athletes at Drake that represent 21 countries and 25 states. This time has been a challenging time for them. However, I am so grateful for the patience, resilience, and understanding of our student-athletes. Our coaches and staff have helped guide our efforts in the athletics department and my colleagues have been fantastic. We also have received incredible support from our campus peers in our Office of Student Life, Drake International Office, Provost's office and many more. This crisis has shown how truly talented the people that work at Drake are in their roles.
 
We now only have a few dozen student-athletes remaining on campus, and all of our programs developed communication plans resulting in frequent engagement with our student-athletes each week by members of our department. Also, our attention as an athletics department has shifted to the changing landscape awaiting us in college athletics.  There are many challenges all athletics departments will face in the coming weeks and months. When we get to the other side of this pandemic, though, the successful athletics departments will be the ones that utilized this time to recognize opportunities and improve themselves. 
 
To that end, in recent virtual meetings held with head coaches and then our entire staff, we identified a list of tips we needed to focus on for our present situation:

1. Set a routine – All of our team members need to develop a structure of what will happen daily, regardless of if they are a staff member or a coach
2. Over-communicate – Frequent discussion through a variety of platforms (phone, text, email, video conference) are an absolute necessity to maintain a sense of community during times of social distancing
3. Establish expectations – Now more than ever, we must be clear on what needs to be accomplished and when it needs to happen
4. Reevaluate and reinvent – We must use this time to review the processes we have always had in place and determine if they must continue to occur as they have been, or if they can be improved.  I'm confident we will tweak some items, scrap others altogether, and develop new processes that we will carry with us when our life as we once knew it resumes.
5. Be human – Keep in mind that few of us have lived through something like this where both our personal and professional lives have simultaneously been turned upside down.  We must be empathetic, flexible, and understanding with one another.

 
In closing, thank you for your continued support of our athletics department.  Please keep taking care of yourself and those closest to you.  Keep in your thoughts the healthcare employees, the people working at our local grocery stores, our first responders, and the rest of our essential frontline employees.  We will get through this together and we look forward to seeing your faces around our events when that day comes.  Go Bulldogs!
 
Sincerely,
 
Brian Hardin