Only a few months had passed since my graduation from West Virginia University. By the morning of September 11, 2001, the world that existed when I received my diploma was gone.
To say that morning was surreal would be the understatement of the century. Read more: 25 years after 9/11: WVU Football and a day that changed us all.
A quarter of a century later, millions of us can still tell you exactly where we were when we first heard the news. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Then another. The Pentagon had been hit. Eventually, we learned that United Flight 93 had crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Like everyone else, I watched it unfold trying to comprehend what I was seeing.
I’ve thought about that many times over the last 25 years. How quickly everything changed. One day you’re worried about grades, getting your story done on time or finding your first job after graduation. The next, you’re trying to comprehend something that changed the country forever.
Even the things we cared deeply about seemed insignificant by comparison. In Morgantown, that included a football season that had begun with plenty of pressure and expectations surrounding a new head coach.
Football is sidelined
The 2001 season was Rich Rodriguez’s first at West Virginia University.
Rodriguez was a West Virginia native coming home to replace Don Nehlen, who had spent 21 seasons building the program. This was supposed to be the beginning of a new era of Mountaineer football.
WVU lost 34-10 at Boston College in Rodriguez’s debut. A week later, the Mountaineers beat Ohio 20-3 at Mountaineer Field, giving him his first victory as WVU’s head coach.
Three days later, football didn’t seem very important anymore.
Games across the country were postponed. West Virginia’s scheduled Sept. 15 game against Maryland was among them.
Think about how quickly the perspective must have changed for Rodriguez. He had spent his professional life working toward this opportunity. He was finally the head coach at West Virginia University, with all the pressure and expectations that came with taking over the program in his home state.
Three days after earning his first victory, all of that suddenly seemed pretty insignificant.
Healing process
WVU returned to the field September 22 against Kent State at Mountaineer Field.
Watching footage from that afternoon 25 years later, what stands out has very little to do with football. The stadium observed a moment of silence for the victims of the attacks. The Pride of West Virginia unfurled an American flag as the national anthem was performed.
Scenes like that were playing out in stadiums across the country as sports returned following the attacks.
Sports obviously weren’t going to heal America. Football couldn’t bring back the people who were lost. It didn’t erase the images we had watched in horror on television.
But it could provide a few hours of normalcy in a world upside down.
We sometimes give sports too much importance. Around here, wins and losses can consume us for an entire weekend. Sept. 11 provided a painful reminder of how insignificant those things really are.
But the days and weeks that followed showed us something else about sports.
For West Virginians, Mountaineer football has always done that. No matter what part of the state you call home, fall Saturdays in Morgantown have a way of bringing everyone together under the Flying WV.
