On the ACC Network show Packer and Durham, NC State director of athletics Boo Corrigan presented his viewpoint of how things unfolded when the Wolfpack was kicked out of the College World Series by the NCAA.

Corrigan confirmed that there were eight positive COVID-19 cases among the 27 players on the travel roster. Four of them had come between the 1-0 win over Vanderbilt Monday evening and the 2 p.m. scheduled rematch on Friday afternoon with the Commodores that was pushed back to 3:07.

“The delay goes on there to figure out how we’re going to play,” Corrigan recalled. “We come up with 13 members of the Pack who go out there and compete in as high a level as you can in going out there, and the job that, the phrase we are using is Pack13, does on that day to compete.”

The team then underwent further testing with what Corrigan described as a goal “to test into being able to play, not to be eliminated but to be able to play.”

Instead, four more positives came back, all from vaccinated players reportedly. That led to a 1 o’clock decision from the NCAA to eliminate NC State from competition. The overnight, abrupt announcement from the NCAA still does not appear to sit well with Corrigan.

“It’s really tough when you got a press release coming out at 2 o’clock in the morning and not much else on top of that,” Corrigan noted.

The Pack AD also noted that his administration tried diligently to keep NC State in the College World Series.

“We fought it. We did,” Corrigan said. “We were fighting all the way along the lines. … This is not, kind of, a sit back and let it happen to us. We were constantly pushing and constantly seeing what we could do and communicating with them.

“We made the decision early on, when you go back to September, that the medical experts were going to be the ones that determined whether we played or not. They determined that we were not going to be able to play. Then we turned our focus to our players and trying to get them home.”

Ultimately, Corrigan is not sure what else could have been done due to the number of positive cases, but he did say that a group was being formulated on campus to identify mistakes and mishaps in the process.

“There really isn’t anything we can do. We made … the decision as a collective that the medical advisors were going to be the one who drive these decisions,” Corrigan reiterated. “We asked about additional testing. We asked if there was anything else we could do.

“At that point, when you are talking about a travel roster of 27 players, with contact tracing, with everything else, the numbers that we had that were positives, there were no other options for us at that point.”

When asked about vaccination of student-athletes, Corrigan noted it remains a personal decision.

"We’ve worked on educating, we’ve worked on the protocols that we have in place if you are vaccinated, the protocols you have in place if you are not vaccinated, but at the end of the day this is a personal decision that everyone has to make on their own,” he explained. “We support their rights to make that decision.”

What Corrigan also doesn’t want to lose sight of is the long list of accomplishments that the baseball team achieved: nearly winning an ACC title after starting 1-8 in the league, sweeping the Louisiana Tech region before handing No. 1 Arkansas its only series loss of the year by beating the most decorated pitcher in college baseball in game three and then coming within a game of the championship series after knocking off the Pac-12 Pitcher of the Year and the top-rated pitcher in the upcoming draft in back-to-back games.

“I don’t want that to get lost in this whole thing, is what the team accomplished and the job that our student-athletes did this to get themselves in the position where they are competing for a national championship,” Corrigan said. “It’s just brutal that we didn’t get to finish the year.”

Corrigan added that there is renewed momentum “to do something with our baseball stadium on campus,” and that there is a plan and an architect for it. The question now is how to move forward with that plan.

Corrigan also wanted everyone to know that they did everything they could to keep the championship dream alive.

“We wanted to play,” Corrigan said. “We wanted to be there. We fought for the opportunity to be there. I don’t think it’s my place .. to tell people how hard we are fighting for everybody.

"You just do. You fight, and you’re angry, and you try to figure out how to move this forward, and how do we represent this great university. How do we represent and try to get our players back on the field?

“At the end of the day it wasn’t an option.”

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