AUBURN — Karen Hoppa has felt the same excitement and anticipation during the opening week of each of her 28 seasons as a soccer coach, including the last 22 at Auburn. But Friday felt “a little bit different.”

“Maybe a lot different,” she said, correcting herself. “It feels really magnified.”

Auburn soccer is used to being the team that kicks off the new athletics year. It played its first home exhibition game of the 2019 season on Aug. 16 – eight days before the volleyball team opened against Georgia Tech and 15 days before Bo Nix hit Seth Williams to lift Tigers football over Oregon in Arlington, Texas.

But Friday’s game against Mississippi State at the Auburn Soccer Complex wasn’t just the first game of the new athletics year; it was the first SEC-sanctioned sporting event played on campus during the COVID-19 era. The last one before that was baseball’s 4-3 loss to Wofford on March 11 – 191 days ago.

The Tigers and Bulldogs played to a 1-1 draw.

Normally, that would have been the story. After the events of the past six months, though, it was just a small part of it.

For the longest time, no one with Auburn soccer knew when or even if this day would come. Whereas the SEC announced a conference-only football schedule on July 30, soccer remained in a holding pattern for nearly a full month; even after the NCAA moved the championship to the spring.

“The hardest part for me was staying disciplined in the times of uncertainty,” senior defender Sarah Houchin said. “Like, when I didn’t know if I was going to play, ‘Should I go run? Should I go practice?’ Because, ‘Is it even worth it?’

Word finally came down last Wednesday — the Tigers would be hosting the first soccer game of the SEC’s eight-week, conference-only fall season.

Planning was a different kind of challenge than it ever has been before. Administrators throughout the department have had ongoing conversations about how to operate athletic events for weeks if not months, associate athletics director for administrative operations Brant Ust said, but they had only a few days to those words into practice. That time was “consumed” by what is now the new normal — capacity limits, ingress and egress, and how to socially distance fans in attendance.

“Many walkthroughs and just visualizing to see what it was,” Ust said.

One hundred and forty-two fans ended up attending Friday’s game, which is a little less than 10% of the Auburn Soccer Complex’s 1,500-seat capacity. About 40 were students, with the rest being players’ families.

Students began lining up outside the gates at 5 p.m. — an hour before the scheduled start. One reminded others to bring their masks, which are mandatory on Auburn’s campus and at all SEC sporting events. Inside the gates, athletic department staff roped half of each section and placed AU logo stickers approximately five feet apart on the remaining bleachers to denote where people were supposed to sit.

The assigned physical distancing didn’t last long in the student section, as many packed closer to their friends, particularly late in regulation and during overtime. Some took their masks off in order to chant louder with the fans who set out blankets to watch the game from hill outside the facility.

Ust said Auburn and event staff will have to continue communicating to students about the importance of following those guidelines, especially as the university prepares to host more than 10,000 students at Jordan-Hare Stadium for the football team’s opener next Saturday. But if Friday was a test run for that game, at least it went off without a hitch.

“It was really a relief,” Ust said. “This community and this university love Auburn athletics, love their Auburn Tigers, and any outlet to support them was much needed. This was a good start. Once the whistle blew and the game was underway, there was a sense of normalcy, finally, in the Auburn athletics world, and we definitely savored it.”

Hoppa echoed those sentiments after the game, though she also would have liked to see a little extra distancing on the scoreboard. Sydney Richards gave Auburn a 1-0 advantage with a goal in the 56th minute, but it didn’t old as Mississippi State’s Niah Johnson sent a penalty kick past freshman goalkeeper Maddie Prohaska in the 76th.

At the end of the day, though, the longtime coach got to lament the first-game jitters and mistakes, praise her team’s growth through them and celebrate the debut of her team’s freshmen. It had to be on Zoom from the other side of the field from where reporters sat and listened, of course, but like Ust said, it felt like something resembling normalcy.

The Tigers were happy to have it. For months, they had to deal with the uncertainty of whether there would be a season. Players made sacrifices and “created a social bubble” in order to avoid infection, which Hoppa said they largely did. Still, they had to wake up Friday morning and get tested for the third time this week as part of the SEC’s health and safety guidelines.

Finally getting to play made it all worth it.

“It felt great,” Hoppa said. “Our players were so grateful and appreciative and excited. It’s been a long time; over six months since they had the opportunity to play soccer, and they were just really thrilled and excited to have that chance.”

Josh Vitale is the Auburn beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. You can follow him on Twitter at @JoshVitale. To reach him by email, click here. If you enjoy Josh’s coverage, consider a digital subscription that will give you access to all of it.