When Houston Baptist quarterback Bailey Zappe finished practice on Tuesday, he went to the socially distanced locker room with his mask on, got changed, checked his Teamworks app and walked into the visitor locker room at Husky Stadium.
Unlike last season, the facility won’t be the site of a breakout season, a winning record and boundless optimism. In fact, it’s impossible for the Huskies to match the four home wins from Fall 2019 all season long. The only residents of the visitor locker room in 2020 is a rotating set of nurses and trainers trying to meet the daunting task of continuously testing an entire football program three times a week.
These specific nurses are from Methodist Health System’s private labs, one of multiple providers that Houston Baptist has contracted with to try and meet the testing demands. After Zappe signed a new round of paperwork, the nurse took a six-inch swab and twisted it around for a good 10 seconds.
“It’s not a pleasant feeling, but you’ve got to do it,” Zappe said.
But while Zappe and his teammates only see the final result of testing, it took an unbelievable amount of work just to get the testing resources to campus.
“It’s been a bit of a scramble 10-14 days out to get all that stuff in place,” said Richie Valdes, assistant AD for sports medicine and performance at Houston Baptist.
The Southland Conference postponed fall football in August, but Houston Baptist had no intention of sitting around. The Huskies scheduled additional games against Texas Tech and Louisiana Tech earlier this year, and were already set to play North Texas. HBU ranks as just one of two Southland teams that opted to schedule teams from multiple FBS conferences in Fall 2020.
Conference USA sent over paperwork officially mandating three tests a week on Aug. 26, one day before Texas Football spoke to Valdes. In the short 10 days before the Huskies were scheduled to take the field against North Texas, the university had to quickly finalize plans.
When the university went out to find enough tests for a whole football team, it spoke to private labs, private practices, urgent cares and hospital systems. Ultimately, the complication of Houston’s serious COVID-19 situation hung over the whole situation.
“We’ve made sure that the people that we’ve talked to have the capacity to where we’re not taking away from emergency capacity,” Valdes said. “That’s the benefit that Houston has versus other towns in our conference where that number is one and the same.”
So to keep the capacity manageable, Houston Baptist organizes testing from three completely separate labs. The Tuesday swab is done by Methodist Health Center. The rapid tests that HBU got done on Thursday are through Neighbors Emergency Center, a major ER chain in Houston. No lab does testing on Sundays, so Houston Baptist organized a self-swab through Fulgent Genetics, a national company that originally built up capacity to aid the Pac-12 before the Power Five league shut down.
When Houston Baptist plays against Big 12 opponent Texas Tech on Sept. 12, the testing will change up again. Instead of a Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday rotation, the Big 12 mandates Sunday-Wednesday-Friday testing.
“Fortunately we’ve gotten into a pretty good system of being able to adapt to whatever really is asked of us,” said Houston Baptist coach Vic Shealy. “We want them to feel like we respect everything that’s been asked of us just like we want our players to feel like they’re in the safest environment to play a ball game.”