The Birmingham-Southern baseball team didn’t have food poisoning from chicken Alfredo after all. Naturally, with this being BSC, it was a little worse than they initially suspected.

Birmingham-Southern College is closed for good, but its team is still playing baseball. It’s the feel-good story of the summer in American sports and is gaining more and more attention nationally by the day.

The thrill ride hasn’t been without some major bumps, though.

The Panthers fly to the Division III Baseball World Series on Wednesday, but some of the players were still getting over an illness on Tuesday during the team’s final practice at their shuttered school. What was initially thought to be food poisoning during the super regional round of the NCAA national baseball tournament actually turned out to be a strand of norovirus.

Birmingham-Southern officially closes on May 31. The D-III World Series begins the same day in Eastlake, Ohio. BSC advanced to the World Series over the weekend with two victories against heavily-favored Denison University. The Panthers swept Denison in the super regional series despite one-third of the team being sick. One player, closer Hansen McCown, even had to go to the hospital.

In all, nine or 10 players from the team were sick during the team’s series-clinching victory against Denison University on Saturday. Three more players fell ill after that, including slugger Ian Hancock. The virus isn’t done with BSC yet, unfortunately. Middle infielder Andrew Dutton is one of the latest players to come down with the stomach bug.

Dutton received fluids intravenously on Tuesday and then rested while the rest of his team practiced. The norovirus is running its course in 24 to 48 hours, say players on the team. It’s been bad. At this point, first-baseman Jackson Webster is one of the only mainline contributors to avoid getting sick.

“Just looking at the roster it can’t be too many more,” coach Jan Weisberg said. “Knock on wood, Webster is the only big one in the lineup that hasn’t gotten it. But I think we’re able to get ahead of it now at least because we know what it is. The team doctor says it presents itself like food poisoning. That’s why we initially thought it was food poisoning.”

LOCAL SUPPORT, NATIONAL ATTENTION

Local Birmingham-area business Diplomat Deli is donating lunches to the Birmingham-Southern baseball team on Wednesday. It’s a thoughtful gesture. There has been no lack of support for the Birmingham-Southern baseball team since advancing out of its regional tournament.

A GoFundMe account for the team went over $100,000 in donations on Tuesday afternoon. The money will go to support the team’s trip to the World Series and money left over will be given to the coaching staff. While other employees have been making plans for their futures, the baseball coaches have been solely focused on providing support for their team. The positive energy of the coaching staff helped turn around the team’s season in time to salvage an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament.

The team was 13-10 when the school announced it was shutting down. Since then, Birmingham-Southern has gone 19-4. Birmingham-Southern lost the first two games of its conference tournament, but received one of the final at-large bids into the national tournament. A documentary crew began shadowing Birmingham-Southern after regionals. The crew started as four people but expanded to 15 after the victory against Denison. Tuesday’s practice felt like the set of a TV show. There was high-end production equipment all over the field.

Weisberg was interviewed for SportsCenter on Tuesday morning and the segment was scheduled to run nationally at 5 p.m. CT. The team will be watching from local Birmingham Greek restaurant Tasty Town. The team says the public is welcomed to attend the send off party.

The team will meet at Birmingham-Southern on Wednesday morning for some fine-tuning in the batting cage and bullpen before taking a bus to the Birmingham airport. BSC took a bus to Granville, Ohio, for the super regionals, but the NCAA is springing for chartered flights for the D-III World Series.

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Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the most controversial sports book ever written, “We Want Bama: A Season of Hope and the Making of Nick Saban’s Ultimate Team.”