NCAA plunges ahead with tournaments
Mount St. Mary’s earned its sixth bid to the NCAA Tournament on Tuesday night by beating Bryant in the Northeast Conference Championship game, setting off a postgame celebration that included joy, anticipation, hugs — and COVID-19 testing.
Before the Mountaineers made the 7½-hour bus trip from Smithfield, Rhode Island, back to Emmitsburg, Maryland, they were tested again Wednesday morning.
“Even last night as we were celebrating, we were on the court and I was reminding guys, ‘Hey, put your mask on,’” Mount St. Mary’s director of basketball operations Jeremy Freeman said during that long bus ride back. “You don’t want the celebration of a championship to not let you get into Indy.”
The Mountaineers and 67 other teams will be playing in an NCAA Tournament like no other. Instead of the event being scattered throughout arenas from coast to coast, every game will be played in Indiana, all but a handful in Indianapolis, and with attendance sharply limited. A similar arrangement is in place for the women’s tournament in and around San Antonio in South Texas.
A year after the tournament was canceled before it began because of the pandemic, a devastating blow financially and emotionally to everyone involved in college sports, the NCAA is determined to keep the coronavirus from being a bracket buster over three careful, hopeful weeks.
Postponements and rescheduling are not the options they were during the regular season. Duke became a cautionary tale Thursday when it was forced to withdraw from the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament after a positive virus test.
“We said from the beginning that the challenge with the tournament versus the regular season is once you get started, it’s hard to pause,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball. “And so the plan is put all the work in on the front end and make sure everybody’s healthy, safe and eligible so the games can go off as scheduled and we can keep the tournament going forward.” GROUND RULES
To play 67 games over three weeks in Indiana, the NCAA is taking over four hotels, five arenas, one NFL stadium and an entire convention center. Teams will be mostly shielded from the general public, including friends and family, from the time they get on buses and planes that will take them to Indianapolis until they are either eliminated or win the whole thing on April 5 at Lucas Oil Stadium.
As long as they play they will operate under strict protocols and tight schedules.
Everybody gets a single hotel room. Every team gets its own floor in a hotel and space at the convention center. For guidance, Gavitt said the NCAA turned to professional leagues such as the NBA and NHL, which successfully staged limited site playoffs last year.
Just don’t call it a bubble. “Well, we’ve used the words ‘controlled environment,’” Gavitt said.
Each member of a team’s 34-person travel party — down from 75 — must complete seven negative COVID-19 tests before leaving for Indianapolis. At least one of those seven tests must be a PCR test, considered the most accurate.
Mount St. Mary’s started its testing Saturday, just in case it earned a bid, and is one of 10 teams expected to arrive in Indianapolis on Saturday. The 17 teams that are scheduled to lock up spots in conference tournaments this weekend are due in Sunday. The rest of the field needs to be in town by Monday with the First Four games set for next Thursday and the first round tipping off the next day.
The NCAA usually pays for teams to travel to tournament sites by charter bus or plane. This year, those arrangements include socially distanced seating plans that have been approved by public health officials in Indiana and personal protective equipment such as N95 masks and goggles to be worn during the trip.
There will be no food or beverage services on planes. Bus drivers will be tested for COVID-19.
“Because you don’t want there to be a potential contact traceable event on the plane,” said Dr. Brian Hainline, the NCAA’s chief medical officer.
Upon arrival in Indianapolis, players, coaches and other team personnel will be tested for COVID-19 and then expected to quarantine until that test result is returned. Then they will be tested again, and returned to quarantine until that result is back. Players will wear devices that track who they have been in close proximity with to aid contact tracing — which everyone is hoping won’t be necessary.