COLUMBUS, Ohio - In a conference call Friday afternoon, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith talked through the decision process of cancelling the Big Ten Men's Basketball tournament and eventually cancelling the remaining winter sports championships and spring sports due to concerns about COVID-19.

Smith has dealt with plenty during his years as athletic director at Ohio State, but he has seen nothing like what COVID-19 has done to the landscape of sports.

""This is uncharted territory for us as an institution, let alone as an athletic department and of course as the Big Ten Conference and the NCAA," Smith said.

The decision was made Thursday shortly before the second round tip of the Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament to cancel the tournament entirely, leaving in limbo the 10 teams that had not yet taken the court.

Later that day, the NCAA announced that the Division I Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments would be cancelled entirely, and the Big Ten later announced that all remaining winter sports championships and spring sports would be cancelled.

While some were hesitant to cancel all remaining Big Ten athletic competitions, Smith has been in this business long enough to know what decision he needed to make.

"Reality is I've just seen so much and understood that if you look at any pandemic, any situation like this in our past, if you look at what happened in China and other countries, we needed to put in measures to mitigate the growth of the virus," Smith said.

The financial concerns of cancelling the remaining spring sports calendar will be calculated at a later date according to Smith, but the first priority was doing right by the student athletes at Ohio State.

Now in his 15th year as athletic director for the Buckeyes, Smith has a deep connection with the thousands of athletes that have been on campus.

He enjoys fostering that relationship with student athletes, but it made the recent decisions to cancel the men's basketball tournament and spring sports even more difficult.

"That's when you get yourself trapped, constantly, in that process of making that decision," Smith said. "Even into Wednesday and Thursday into the conversations, you still go back to that because you have the faces. I have Andre Wesson's face. I know what he's gone through."

Despite having the close connection to the athletes and knowing what the cancellations would do to them, prematurely ending the careers of many Buckeyes, Wesson included, Smith knew the decision he had to make, and it was done to protect the athletes that he advocates for.

"You're having these conversations and those faces pop up constantly, but you've got to think about what's right in our society, what's right for the people we serve," Smith said. "We got to think beyond that, so that was really hard. That's probably the hardest part of this whole deal, me knowing many of the athletes like I do."