Contact tracing hastened return
Despite precautions, Danes still haven’t opened their season
This isn’t about making it to the finish line. The University at Albany men’s basketball team is just trying to get to the starting gate.
Ualbany had its first media availability Tuesday since late October, shortly before the program was paused for the first of two times during the preseason. “Presumptive positive tests” for COVID -19 within the team’s Tier 1 group — coaches, student-athletes, team managers and athletic trainers — caused the suspension of practice twice.
The first was for 23 days, ending the evening before Thanksgiving. The team was back barely a week before another pause order, only this one was lifted after three days. Why the difference?
“In both cases,” Ualbany athletic director Mark Benson said, “we were relying on the contact tracing and the testing to get to the point of who can return, and for those who can’t return, how long do they have to stay out? The process is exactly the same. The situations were different.”
Great Danes coach Will Brown would much rather discuss substitution patterns and defense than university procedures during COVID.
“I’m not sure I’m smart enough to explain all of that to you,” Brown said during a virtual media availability, “so I leave that up to the medical experts, the people here on campus, our training staff, the department of health. The one thing I will tell you is that this last situation, what helped us greatly is when we resumed, we made a commitment in our program to continue to wear the masks.
“When you get into any type of contact tracing, when you have masks on, it helps the situation. We’re still learning about this. Each situation is a little different. I like to defer in these situations to our training staff and the medical experts, but there is a difference between an institutional pause, an individual team having a positive (test) and a pause or a quarantine. So a lot goes into it, and every situation is a little bit different.”
Ualbany’s situation is different than a lot of teams in the country in that the Great Danes still haven’t played a game. The targeted season opener is Saturday, Dec. 19, against MarylandBaltimore County, which may have six games played by the time it arrives at SEFCU Arena.
“It’s definitely hard to to see all the teams around the country playing right now,” junior guard Antonio Rizzuto said, “and we still haven’t got a chance to do that, let alone practice for weeks and weeks like some other teams. The returning guys, some of the new guys, we all just need to step up together and just be excited, know and really study what we have to do, to cram a little bit and play a game.”
“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now,” said junior Cameron Healy, the leading returning scorer from last year, “and that’s been the toughest part, not knowing what the season’s going to look like, even what next week is going to look like. It has been tough mentally staying ready and staying sharp. That’s why I’ve just been doing as much individual development as I can just trying to be ready.”
The Great Danes already have had three nonconference games taken off the schedule. The opener against UMBC actually is a two-game weekend series, both at SEFCU.
Brown said that a nonconference game scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 23, against Bryant at SEFCU is still on, even though it doesn’t appear on Bryant’s schedule.
“We have the Bryant game,” Brown said, “and I’m talking to one or two people and I just got to see if we can get it done about a potential game after Christmas. Everything in regard to scheduling is day by day.
“It doesn’t matter if we’re prepared or not, we’ve got to be ready to go. The team (UMBC) that we play opening night, if it stays as is, basically has been going without any interruption since early August, and they ’ll probably have five or six games in by the time we play them. You know what? We need to deal with it, we need to be ready to go, and finally we’ll have some good film to watch us against someone else.”