The year mark has arrived since SEC officials, and their counterparts around the country, chose to shut down winter and spring sports, and change the landscape for fall sports across college athletics.

As the SEC women’s basketball tournament got underway this week in Greenville, South Carolina, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey appeared on the SEC Network with Alyssa Lang to discuss some of the decisions, and accomplishments from the last year.

Sankey shared that Alabama’s DeVonta Smith winning the Heisman Trophy, Vanderbilt’s Sarah Fuller playing soccer and football — then participating in the presidential inauguration — along with scores of women’s basketball teams being ranked, were just some of the reasons to celebrate the decision to try to play.

“That doesn’t happen if we don’t try,” Sankey said. “Back in the summertime, it was ‘We’ll try, we’ll try to make this happen. I can’t promise you anything, I don’t have all the answers’ … At that time, the answer was a lot of doubt, a lot of questions, a lot of uncertainty. We brought some clarity to it. They’ve expressed appreciation. We made things happen. DeVonta Smith wasn’t on the Heisman Trophy Watch List in August. Yet because we tried, it’s taken place. You’ve got 10 top 50 teams in women’s basketball. That doesn’t happen unless you try. You go to Arkansas men’s basketball, I think 10 straight conference wins. … That’s why it was important to try and we’ve accomplished a lot because of that.”