Some Concordia students pitched in. Some sporting events were cancelled, but more because of the cold than the flood. Sports programs, like colleges themselves, often struggle against seeming trivial in the context of a world stricken with natural and man-made disasters. It's a continuing challenge. Some feel fiddling while Rome burned was only slightly more tacky than our current habit of playing games while children starve and the homeless freeze.
Games have their place.
But it is a narrow place, the size of which is easily overestimated by their participants. When our nation has been at war the games we play have seemed simultaneously irrelevant and essential. A Yankees-Dodgers series never carried quite the significance of an Allies vs Hitler battle. But, as a counterpoint, there is the famous World War II story of two U.S. soldiers spending a night in a foxhole near the German line. They are listening quietly to the World Series on the radio.