Game freezing at creating walkons

So here's my scoop... I was actually playing the 2018 version, and by the end of a season I had gotten annoyed at this one walk-on player always showing up in my team incident report. So, I decided to waive him. (Hey, it seemed the best for all parties involved
). Then I was going thru the off-season stages (Hiring coaches, Transfers, etc), and after the 6th and final transfer session the next phase is "creating walkons". And it just locks up here. I've let my PC stay here for over a couple hours, and no movement.
To try something, I went and head and got the 2019 version(Happy to Support!), and was able to successfully import my 2018 league. But when I try and advance it locks up at the exact same point. So doesn't look like that will be my fix.
I'm only assuming it's because I waived a walk-on that it's freezing at the creating walk-on stage as something confused it, but it may be purely coincidental. Also of note, when I go to export database now it gives me an error of "Unhandled exception occurred: Field "Teams.State cannot be a zero-length string". Although it actually does export the database to my files.
So I don't know if anyone has any suggestions? I could try and modify the database and put that walk-on back on my team, although I haven't modified the dB yet. (Do I really have to buy Access?)
Thanks!!

To try something, I went and head and got the 2019 version(Happy to Support!), and was able to successfully import my 2018 league. But when I try and advance it locks up at the exact same point. So doesn't look like that will be my fix.
I'm only assuming it's because I waived a walk-on that it's freezing at the creating walk-on stage as something confused it, but it may be purely coincidental. Also of note, when I go to export database now it gives me an error of "Unhandled exception occurred: Field "Teams.State cannot be a zero-length string". Although it actually does export the database to my files.
So I don't know if anyone has any suggestions? I could try and modify the database and put that walk-on back on my team, although I haven't modified the dB yet. (Do I really have to buy Access?)
Thanks!!