Canada West cancels fall sports over COVID-19 fears
There was nothing in Chris Morris’s playbook to deal with this scenario.
The head coach of the University of Alberta Golden Bears football program saw his season get sidelined when Canada
West cancelled conference competition on the upcoming fall schedule due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Besides football, that leaves soccer, rugby and field hockey out in the cold come September as 17 member universities across B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba voted unanimously on Friday to forego all regular season, playoffs and championships.
Just last month, the U Sports conference came up with a new schedule format that would see reduced games and travel for all sports, while also emphasizing health and safety. But with the loss of the fall seasons, hockey, basketball and volleyball programs who typically span both semesters won’t start before January 2021 — if they even get to go ahead at all. Canwest said that decision will be made by
Oct. 8, and will also decide the fate of first-term conference championships in golf, swimming and cross-country by
July 15.
Similar cancellations were also announced Monday by Ontario University Athletics and Atlantic University Sport, two other conferences that help make up U Sports.
“While professional sports leagues continue to explore options for a return to competition, the resources they will have at their disposal to minimize the risk of infection will not be the reality for Canada West members when the transition from training to competition eventually occurs,” said a news release.
It’s a financial reality that made Monday’s decision a possibility all the way back in March, when teams were being turned back from national championships in volleyball and hockey as the pandemic hit home.
And now, just as some businesses begin to open back up and there appeared to be some light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, the train will no longer be stopping at the 2020 station for Bears football.
“It’s disappointing. I can’t say that it’s a surprise,” Morris said. “I think when everybody found out that a lot of the students wouldn’t be back on campus in the fall and things would be done through remote learning, you’ve got to remember all of these varsity athletics are funded by student fees.”
Morris’s understanding is football players approaching the age limit of 25 won’t be charged a year of eligibility for the missed season, but that will also lead to ramifications both up and down gridiron’s food chain.
“There’s a backlog of guys now. The guys that were supposed to go to the CFL this year probably aren’t going to get the opportunity to do it. The draft the CFL is going to have is going to be compromised. How are they going to bring in draft choices from two classes in a row into one training camp? So that’s going to complicate things,” Morris said. “From our standpoint, we’re going to have a bunch of players coming back that were going to be done and those guys are going to be scholarship athletes.
“And then we have the whole new recruiting class coming in behind them, and normally those scholarships would go to the new recruiting class. So now there’s going to be scholarship-cap implications with that. There’s going to be space-on-the-team implications for that. There’s usually space made open for guys, now 2021 is going to be a pretty full roster right from the beginning if nobody ages out or loses their eligibility.”
It’s a real dog pile of issues U Sports will have to crawl out from under to give programs a direction to work toward, including when they can begin training together again.