While Feltman was trying to take care of getting the players set up for the change of plans, Head Coach Tom Soehn’s focus was on making sure his squad would be able to carry forward the right mentality as they refocused their energy for a Sunday-morning kickoff. While a 10 a.m. kickoff might have been familiar for Legion FC’s players during their academy days, it was the first time Soehn had experienced such a circumstance in the professional ranks.

Given the stop-start nature of Saturday night’s preparations – where the sides had warmed up twice before the game was officially postponed due to the heavy rain in the area – there was plenty for Soehn and his assistants to do to make sure the players would be ready the next day.

“You get them all revved up for starting, then you cool them down and let them relax so anxiety doesn’t get to them,” Soehn said of the delays. “Then you get to the locker room and you kind of lighten the mood a little bit and as you get back out there again you fired them up again. I honestly probably did it four or five times on the day. Then the disappointment of not playing, you have to manage that. When you get back to the hotel you talk about how you carry what we had ready for that game for the next day.”

The stop-start nature of Saturday’s preparations hadn’t just affected Soehn. For Corkery, there was the issue of dealing with a sizeable amount of apparel that would in some cases need to be soaked, washed and dried before the players arrived back in the locker room the following morning. The side taking to the field in its all-white road uniforms for a 15-minute warm-up before the game was finally postponed was the biggest issue and made Corkery’s night the longest of anyone’s.

Fortunately for Corkery and the rest of Birmingham’s traveling party, in Louisville’s Director of Operations Andrew DiLallo and Equipment Manager Ben Hulsmen they had two important allies in getting things turned around.

“Andrew was very hospitable, and they made a bad situation as good as they could,” said Corkery. “It would’ve been much more difficult to do everything we needed to do without their help. I’m sure they could’ve said ‘you need to get all of your gear out of the locker room’ and I would have had to put it back in the morning, but they didn’t.”

“I heard from [USL Director of League Operations] Justen Braddock at one point before our trip that Andrew DiLallo was one of the best in our positions,” added Feltman. “[We] got really lucky that something like this happened on a trip to Louisville where their equipment manager and their team admin were fully prepared, and they were ready to go for something like this.”

As Feltman and Corkery loaded up the gear to take back to the hotel, Humphries was making sure that his colleagues would get fed as well as the players and coaches. As Corkery started soaking the uniforms in OxiClean to get out any mud and grass that had been picked up during warm-ups and loading the warm-up gear into the hotel’s laundry facilities, dinner arrived.

While the machines worked, Corkery and Feltman got a brief chance to relax after a hectic couple of hours.

“There was a weird kind of calm [as we ate dinner] that we felt prepared and that we were going to be able to get it done,” said Corkery.