Halfway through what would turn out to be his football team’s final practice of the 2020 season, Charlotte coach Will Healy spotted athletics director Mike Hill walking toward the field and figured he probably wasn’t bringing good news.
The previous few months hadn’t given Healy a reason to expect anything else. At various points, Charlotte had learned of games being canceled from its charter plane on the way to North Texas, from its team hotel in Boca Raton, Florida, and on a Friday afternoon when Georgia State got a bad batch of COVID-19 test results — only to learn later they were false positives.