Ball of confusion
Maryland universities face uncertainty as they plan for fall sports; Terps suspend voluntary football workouts because of positive tests
UMBC athletic director Brian Barrio equated his current work to building a house on quicksand. Jennifer Baker, his counterpart at Johns Hopkins, compared it to unpredictable crises she faced while serving in the Navy. “There’s a lot of unknowns,” Towson athletic director Tim Leonard said with a mordant laugh. “Like almost all of it.”
These are the terms Baltimore-area athletic directors are using as they try to plan fall seasons against a mercurial, frightening backdrop created by the coronavirus pandemic. As local universities look ahead to the next six months, administrators hope their student-athletes will get back to practicing and playing games.
But the latest news has hardly inspired optimism. On Thursday, the Big Ten announced its schools, including Maryland, would play conference-only schedules in football and other fall sports. On Wednesday, the Ivy League postponed its entire fall athletic schedule, with hopes — but no promise —
of pushing games to the spring. That announcement came a few hours after Stanford, one of the wealthiest universities in the country, said it would cut 11 programs from its highly successful athletic department. Another college sports titan, Ohio State, suspended workouts for its fall teams. The ACC postponed the start of Olympic sports (men’s and women’s cross country, field hockey, men’s and women’s soccer and volleyball) until Sept. 1.
Locally, Johns Hopkins and McDaniel saw their fall football schedules wiped out and all fall sports postponed until October at the earliest, under a decision announced Tuesday by the Centennial Conference.
Around the country, hopes for anything resembling a normal college football season have faded as COVID-19 cases have surged in sports hotbeds such as Florida, Texas and California.
“A lot of people aren’t as optimistic,” Leonard said.
The Ivy League postponement could prove to be a powerful domino as conferences and universities decide what to do next. That was the case in March, when the collection of academic powerhouses suspended its basketball tournament ahead of other prominent conferences.
“They’re a thought leader in this space,” Baker said. “I think everybody looks at what the Ivies are doing, because they’re not afraid to make bold decisions. That’s part of their brand as a conference, so their announcement … will obviously send a message to everyone else. It doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone else, but I think they have a lot of credibility.”
At Maryland, the state’s lone Power 5 football school, players have been on campus, participating in voluntary workouts since mid-June. Maryland athletics on Saturday announced it is suspending voluntary football workouts after reporting its first positive cases of the coronavirus.
According to a news release, in an on-campus screening of 185 student-athletes and staff, nine individuals tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The individuals have been notified and are in self-isolation. Contact tracing is ongoing through the Prince George’s County Health Department and all individuals must follow a 14-day self-observation period.
“We continue to work with medical experts to best focus on how to proceed for this coming season in a safe and responsible fashion,” Maryland athletic director Damon Evans said in a statement. “We know there are significant unknowns at this time but are working to ensure the health and safety of everyone in our campus community remains our top priority.”
Universities face several layers of complexities as they prepare to welcome athletes back. All will test for COVID-19 but most are still deciding how regularly and under what circumstances. Administrators also have to grapple with how to separate athletes as much as possible and how quickly to halt activities if positive tests accumulate.
Then there are economic concerns. At Towson, for example, Leonard will have to pay a six-figure bill for COVID testing at the same time he’s facing a 25-30% cut to his operating budget. His peers described similar pressures, though they offered fewer details.
“Every source of revenue that an athletic department has, from fundraising to corporate sponsorship to ticket sales to state support, all of that is going to decline this year,” Barrio said. “There’s not one athletic department in the country that’s not going to take a hit.”
Hence the program cuts announced at athletic powers such as Stanford, Connecticut and Boise State. Local athletic directors said they’ve not been forced to consider such drastic measures, but the disturbing headlines from other campuses hit home.
“I think everybody immediately wants to jump to that and say, ‘Well, if we’ve got to make cuts, what would we do, what kind of draconian moves could we do right now,’ ” Leonard said. “We’re not thinking that. That’s not what our goal is.”
Administrators agreed that schools with football, such as Maryland, Navy, Morgan State and Towson, face a more difficult outlook than those without. For all the revenue it brings, football requires more athletes than any other sport at a time when universities are looking to keep students in smaller groups to prevent coronavirus from spreading. It also comes with timing and fan pressures that don’t factor as much in lower-profile sports such as soccer, cross country and volleyball. At schools from the Power 5 conferences (Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC), it’s often the key building block for athletic department budgets.
“I love football, but in the last four months, I have to admit I’ve appreciated not having to deal with the larger numbers of issues that football schools are facing at the moment,” Loyola Maryland athletic director Donna Woodruff said.
Towson welcomed a batch of football players to campus this week and another batch will arrive next week. As his department revs up again, Leonard said he feels confident in plans for COVID-19 testing but uneasy about what will happen next.
“People are going to test positive. We know that just from watching the news,” Leonard said. “So we’ve got a plan in place, and we’re going to follow it to a T, but … how many other people have to quarantine because they’ve had contact with a person who’s tested positive? It’s getting clearer, but still, that’s going to be a big issue for us.”
He hopes recent negative headlines will not spur the Colonial Athletic Association to make a hasty decision about fall sports, including football. Universities showed in the spring they could shut down sports quickly, so why not wait to see where the news trends? Towson football was scheduled to open its season with a Sept. 5 nonconference matchup against Maryland. The loss of that game (and the vital revenue associated with it) because of the Big Ten’s scheduling decision illustrates how little control individual institutions have in the current landscape.
“No one’s going to confuse Towson with Alabama,” Leonard said. “But it’s not easy to say, ‘Ah, we just won’t play games.’ Because it means a lot to a lot of people, and there’s some revenue that comes from it.”
At Navy, sports information director Scott Strasemeier said “it’s really too early” to comment on athletic plans for the fall. “Way too many unknowns right now,” he said.
Morgan State and Coppin State did not provide information on their plans for playing in the face of the pandemic, though Morgan previously announced 60 studentathletes, including football players, would return to campus for voluntary workouts on Monday.
As a member of the Patriot League, Loyola is preparing for fall seasons (which can’t begin before Sept. 4) in men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross country and volleyball, along with some activities in rowing and golf. Woodruff said athletes are expected to return to campus in mid-August, though the university’s plan for COVID testing is still in the works.
“Even as you feel like you’re making plans and progress to return … there are so many unknowns,” she said. “The best you can do is say, ‘I’m confident we will have a good plan for the safe return of our student-athletes and our students when they come back to campus.’ ”
At Hopkins, Baker said she and her coaches and athletes appreciated the certainty created by the Centennial Conference’s recent postponement announcement, even though the news was not good.
“We choose to be optimistic about what remains for the fall, but in a COVID era, we have to be cautious in that optimism,” she said. “Do I want my athletes to have the opportunity to compete and play? Absolutely. But only if it’s safe to do so. I don’t know how to be optimistic about that right now.”
Though plans for testing and distancing aren’t set, Baker feels confident they’ll be informed by the leading medical experts in the world, many of whom work for Hopkins.
UMBC is planning for an altered but robust fall athletic season conducted under testing and distancing protocols developed with campus health administrators and the America East Conference.
“At this point, I think we’re prepared for any number of contingencies,” Barrio said. “I think the biggest variable is just the trajectory of the virus and the treatments, all those things that are outside of our control.”
The university has not set a return date for athletes in its five fall sports: men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross country and volleyball. But Barrio saw the emotional devastation athletes felt when spring sports were canceled, so he said UMBC will do anything it can, within safe bounds, to avoid a repeat.
“I hate the impression folks have that this is just fun and games, so we’ll put it on hold for a year,” he said. “These are really serious athletes for whom this is an important part of their physical and mental well-being.”