NEW ORLEANS — Billy Napier firmly believes that overcoming the adversity from last year’s COVID-19 impacted season will help his football team as the Ragin’ Cajuns gear up for fall camp.

“I think it gives our players even more conviction in needing that preparation and really having conviction in how we do things,” the University of Louisiana coach said during Thursday’s Sun Belt Conference Football Media Day. “I think the pandemic presented a number of issues but it was the ultimate leadership challenge last year.”

Georgia State coach Shawn Elliot echoed Napier’s sentiment.

“The things that you make important, the things that you make challenging become challenges for your team,” Elliot said. “Yeah, we were dealing with the COVID issues and everyone was dealing with that, but at some point in time, you had to say we are here to play football. Let’s move beyond COVID.”

There was a immense sense of relief on the eighth floor of the Sheraton Hotel on Thursday during the annual event which kicks off the SBC football season.

After having last year’s event scrapped due to the pandemic — and having games including the SBC Championship canceled due to COVID protocols — there was a celebratory tone to the festivities.

It all began when SBC Commissioner Keith Gill walked out to Earth, Wind and Fire’s classic “September.”

“For me today is like Christmas morning,” Gill said. “I can not imagine a better place to be than right here, right now.”

Even though the SBC’s 10 head coaches may not have been so overjoyed to walk out to their favorite 1970s band on Thursday, that didn’t mean they weren’t happy to be there.

“For one, it is refreshing because you were almost walking on egg shells the previous year,” Coastal Carolina Jamey Chadwell said. “What do we do and what do we not do? To get back to some sort of routine. That’s been good to be part of.”

“I love it,” Georgia Southern coach Chad Lunsford said. “I am proud of what we did last year, proud of what we accomplished and had to overcome. But I don’t want to have to do it again.”

Added Troy coach Chip Lindsey, “You don’t realize how much you miss something until you don’t get to do it like last year.”

Being forced last year to deal with managing rosters and ever-changing schedules due to COVID protocols, many SBC coaches learned plenty about themselves and their programs.

“You had no choice this year but to learn something,” Appalachian State coach Shawn Clark said. “The thing I learned the most was to take it day by day and enjoy the process. It is a cliche thing to say but it made me enjoy football again because it was taken away some. If you take football for granted you will lose it.”

For Napier, he learned just how important the offseason programs were to his team’s ability to execute on the field.

“If you just really evaluated our team last year with the quality of football we played, I don’t think it was our best effort,” Napier said. “I think that was a product of the work that we missed out on. We didn’t have our traditional spring semester and our traditional summer program. I think the way we played was reflected in that.”

Texas State coach Jake Spavital, meanwhile, views what happened in 2020 as a positive, especially considering the amount of playing time his young Bobcats earned.

“You end up looking at the positive of last year,” Spavital said. “With that eligibility freeze, I thought our problem got a lot of great valuable experience playing 12 games. I know everybody in this conference got to play a lot of games and many games, which is going to be great moving forward.”

As optimistic as everyone was Thursday, there were still plenty of caution being preached. With COVID-19 cases on the rise due to the Delta variant, Gill

“We must remain vigilant,” said Gill, who announced that if a team can’t play a game due to COVID it would be ruled a forfeit. “The public health crisis created by COVID-19 is not over and the danger is real. The Delta variant is something that worries me and certainly is threatens to disrupt the 2021 football season.”

Gill further stated, “I encourage everyone — our student athletes, coaches to get vaccinated, so we can put COVID and this healthy crises in the rearview mirror soon.”

That cautious optimism was shared by the two coaches whose programs were the most affected by COVID — Louisiana and Coastal Carolina.

The SBC Championship Game between the two was canceled two days before the game due to a positive test with the Chanticleers.

“The challenge from that is that COVID is still not out of the way,” Chadwell said. “Is everybody getting vaccinated? No, so how do we handle things? There are still some of things that you had to do and probably got to keep in place to hopefully have your team for 14 games.”

“Were excited but I know were not out of the woods yet but we are headed in the right direction,” Napier said. “This Delta variant is presenting a whole new set of issues but the good thing is that we managed some of those things before. We havea good blueprint on how to go about things.”