Sewanee won’t play football in fall 2020
The Sewanee football program dates to 1891 and a humble origin of a schedule that was made up of three games: two lopsided losses to Vanderbilt that sandwiched a shutout victory against Tennessee — another first-year program — in Chattanooga.
The Tigers have since persisted through World War I, a flu pandemic that limited but did not cancel the 1918 season, the Great Depression, changes in conference affiliations and major overhauls to the game. Only World War II kept them off the football field as Sewanee did not field an official team for four years (1942-45), and last year marked the program’s 125th season.
The coronavirus is proving to be college athletics’ toughest foe in 2020, though, and now it has bitten the Tigers, too.
The council of presidents for the Southern Athletic Association, the NCAA Division III league to which Sewanee belongs, voted Thursday to suspend all conference competition for the fall semester of the 2020-21 school year. Clarifying what that means, Sewanee announced that none of its fall or winter sports teams would participate against outside competition during the upcoming term, referred to at Sewanee as the Advent semester. (The spring semester is considered the Easter semester.)
Football will be joined by the teams for men’s and women’s cross country, field hockey, men’s and women’s soccer and volleyball in being sidelined, although coaches will be allowed to hold practices with student-athletes, according to a Sewanee release, and there is hope of those sports making up for lost time in the competitive arena.
“The highest priority at each institution is the health and well being of our campus communities, student-athletes, coaches, administrators and spectators,” SAA commissioner Jay Gardner said in the release. “As the pandemic evolves, the SAA will continue to monitor the situation and intends to resume fall sport competition in early 2021.”
Other sports that start later in the semester, including basketball, are also affected.
“As difficult and disappointing as this decision is to the Sewanee athletic community, most notably our student-athletes, this course of action is absolutely necessary to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 on the Domain and to promote a healthy and safe on-campus experience for our students, faculty and staff,” Sewanee athletic director Mark Webb said in the release.
Sewanee is not alone in what has become an increasingly troubling outlook for fall sports around the nation.
In the Chattanooga area, D-III member Covenant College learned this week that its fall sports teams would be adjusted to division-only play within the USA South Athletic Conference and that neutral sites could be used to eliminate overnight travel.
The NAIA, which includes Bryan College and Tennessee Wesleyan of the Appalachian Athletic Conference as well as Dalton State College of the Southern States Athletic Conference, updated its members earlier this month with guidelines on the fall sports season that include a threshold policy in which “the goal is for approximately half the participating institutions in each sport to receive clearance from local authorities to return to competition before the season can begin.” The NAIA has also changed the minimum and maximum number of games a team must play.
And the NJCAA, which includes Chattanooga State and Cleveland State, earlier this week announced that “close-contact fall sports,” including volleyball, will be moved to the spring this school year and that winter sports, including basketball, won’t start until January.