Working at the university level prepares campus employees to deal with a diversity of negative issues and even with crises. COVID-19 did away with the rule book for how to handle university crises as universities fell into the middle of a worldwide pandemic beyond what almost every university employee could have imagined. When administrators first closed schools around the nation, many believed we, as educators, were entering a fairly short-term crisis. What started as a few weeks or a few months of total disruption, turned into one of the worst pandemics in the history of the world. Almost nobody could imagine that more than a million people would die in the US, or that the world of business would come to a standstill, or that people would spend months of not being able to even see their family members in the hospital, other than through their hospital room windows or video calls. At our small university, institutional leadership developed an incident command (IC) team to work as a group to try to manage the everchanging pandemic while also attempting to continue to effectively educate as many of our students as possible. In this article, I describe our efforts, our successes and our failures, and discuss the lessons my colleagues and I learned from our experiences. I hope that these experiences will help the reader to be better prepared for the next life-changing crisis that their institution will face.