A week ago, as the Gamecocks were preparing to fly to Nashville for the SEC Tournament, Ray Tanner’s name popped up on Andy Assaley’s phone.

Assaley, the team’s director of operations, picked up and was informed Vanderbilt’s campus is closing due to COVID-19 and Tanner asked Assaley what he thought about it.

“I said, ‘Coach, this is uncharted waters. I don’t know what’s going on here,’” Assaley told GamecockCentral.

Assaley was in the finale stages of getting things ready to go for what he and the rest of the team hoped was a long stay in the Music City as the Gamecocks fought to get back onto the bubble.

What the trip turned into was “by far the craziest and scariest” 36 hours of Assaley’s career working in operations.

The Gamecocks touched down in Nashville Tuesday night amid whispers of how the Coronavirus would impact not only the SEC Tournament but tournaments across the country.

For the players, it’s about showing up and playing the games that are scheduled. For Assaley, his job is a little tougher.

Living almost exclusively behind the scenes with the team, Assaley is in charge of making sure everything from travel to meals to practice space is set up for the coaches and players, making his stint in Nashville a whirlwind.

Assaley is paid to come up with everything that could go wrong and find solutions, but typically global pandemic isn’t in the guidebook.

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“There’s fear and concern and really worried about things greater than just the tournament. But at the same time we’re still playing the tournament,” Assaley said. “You have to hurry up and figure out: what’s my alternative? What are plans? If I can’t use this gym, do I go here? What’s going on in town? Different things like that. We ended up being able to still use their gym, so that calmed things down for a second.”

The Gamecocks practiced Wednesday morning at Vanderbilt before heading to Bridgestone Arena, the site of the tournament, and shot around a little over 24 hours before they were scheduled to tip off against either Arkansas or Vanderbilt.

As they did, alerts started popping up saying the NCAA Tournament would be held with no fans, putting the tournament and subsequently every conference tournament in jeopardy.

For Assaley, though, he still had to maintain the idea South Carolina would tip off late Thursday night.

“We thought we were going to play. You have in the back of your mind you’re panicking about but you’re still moving forward thinking you’re playing. You’re wondering how things in other places are going to domino, but you still have to move forward,” he said. “I still need to make sure we have a place to practice. I have an itinerary and have to make sure we stick to that itinerary and everyone knows what’s going on. You can’t be paralyzed by panic. You have to move forward and keep working, which is what we did.”

The SEC announced Wednesday night the tournament would be played with no fans as news trickled out about NBA player Rudy Gobert having the virus.

“As a staff, Wednesday night I think Coach (Bruce) Shingler said, ‘We might not play.’ We all said, ‘Nah, nah, nah.’ But no this might be (bad),” Assaley said. “This was right before we shut it down for the night. I wake up on Thursday morning and call the airline saying if we’re canceling this, we have to get the players home. We have to do this stuff and what’s our exit strategy. He said, ‘You’re not the only ops person in the country calling me asking this.’”

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Then, around 11 a.m. local time, the SEC’s official release came out nixing the entire tournament and leaving the Gamecocks needing to get home and get home quickly.

“I have to call the airline, I have to call our buses, I have to call and make sure we’re ready to go. If it’s dangerous for us to be there, we can’t have the players there,” Assaley said. “We can’t have them there at all. We don’t want to be there. When I came home Thursday night, it was a sight for sore eyes to see my wife and kids.”

In preparation for the cancelation, Assaley spent the entire morning coordinating with their charter flight company trying to find a way back to Columbia.

Teams don’t have planes ready on retainer when they travel, so it was about finding a plane in the area and having it find its way to Nashville to pick the Gamecocks up and take them home.

“It was, where are planes and which planes are we able to take to head home? If this is canceled, what can we do to prepare? It turns out we already had a couple of options. There were planes that other college teams and some NASCAR drivers moving around and were in position. It was about how soon they can get to us. I worry about us, but you have all the other teams—Butler and Dayton and Georgia—in the same company. it was piggybacking off their flights. If their plane lands in Florida or somewhere it’s how quickly that plane can get to Nashville or could we take a plane from Atlantic City to Nashville? What’s going on and what’s the strategy?”

The Gamecocks had three times they could have left: 4 p.m., 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. but at 11:30 that morning Assaley got a call saying a plane was headed their direction and would be there at 2 p.m.

"I said, great, we’re jumping on the bus and getting out the door,” Assaley said.

South Carolina hopped on the bus and got to the airport, taking off at 3 p.m. local and touching down around 6 p.m. in Columbia.

The next few days were spent coordinating player travel back home, a welcomed task compared to what the Gamecocks left in Nashville.

“They never really balked at anything. I felt our communication was pretty good with them. They knew to be on call with things," he said. "They knew to be on call to leave at some point. The whole season they were good with things, and that carried over. They responded well to all of this.”

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The previous nightmare story from an operations perspective for Assaley was back in his days at Kansas State with Frank Martin when the team’s flight home from Chicago was canceled and the team had to bus 10 hours back home in a blizzard and were slowed for almost eight hours thanks to a pileup on Interstate 55.

This most recent situation, Assaley said, takes the cake on his craziest story so far.

“I’m kind of praying for everybody,” Assaley said. “We respect the enormity of the situation. I think that’s starting to show. Let’s take it seriously. That’s one of the things I kept saying: it pays to take things seriously, and here we are. We need to definitely take things seriously.”