Procedures in place as Longhorns return
Herman proud of his football staff as players start voluntary workouts
AUSTIN — On Monday, almost five dozen Texas football players will be allowed to line up outside Denius Practice Fields and await entrance.
Players will park in a designated lot. They can carpool only with those they live with. They’ll stand the requisite 6 feet apart, utilize the hand sanitizer stations, receive a temperature check at the gate and keep a mask on as much as possible as voluntary football workouts officially begin.
“This is something that they don’t write a manual for,” coach Tom Herman said Thursday. “But everybody in our organization has done a phenomenal job of rising to the occasion and making sure certainly that the safety and well-being of our players and staff are at the forefront of everybody’s mind and really drives everything.
“We’ve been preparing for Monday for a long time, longer than a lot of people. We knew this day would come. We just didn’t know what it would look like.”
What it’s going to look like is players rotating between covered weight rooms spread across the facility. None of the workouts will take place inside the bubble. And players will remain only with their assigned lift groups, which meet three times per week, while working out.
“We’re still not allowed as coaches to even be present at those workouts,” Herman said. “There won’t be any coaching from a football aspect.
“But our strength coaches can be there to monitor and administer those workouts, which is obviously a huge step in the right direction. And we’ll be able to do it within our facilities. I applaud our strength staff — we’re, I don’t want to say on the cutting edge, but we kind of thought outside the box a little bit on how do we get this done.”
This first group of Longhorns, featuring players who live off-campus, will return to the field at a time when COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are surging.
On Saturday, the state reported 2,242 people in hospitals with lab-confirmed COVID-19, up 731 from Memorial Day. As of Friday, the state has reported more than 86,000 cases with 56,535 recoveries and 1,957 fatalities.
The University of Houston already had to suspend workouts after six studentathletes tested positive for the coronavirus. The school did not test all athletes who returned in anticipation of the start of voluntary workouts June 1.
UT this week reported two football players tested positive for COVID-19 while another tested positive for antibodies. Even so, Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte feels secure with the system the athletic department has in place, which includes a second phase set to begin Monday when freshmen and those who live on campus arrive.
“I don’t think any of us expected not to have a single player or a single staff member test positive for COVID-19,” Herman said. “That was not our goal. I think that would have been a bit of a pipe dream had we set out for that to be the goal.
“But the goal is, one, to reduce. Make sure that we take every step necessary with all of our mitigation strategies in order to make sure that that number stays as low as possible. And then when someone does test positive that we are making sure that that young man or staff member is dotting every I and crossing every ‘T’ in terms of the return to activity protocols that have been set in place.”
The key to Texas being able to avoid a situation similar to UH is making sure it immediately identifies players with COVID-19 and isolates them to prevent a team-wide spread, which could then scatter out among older, more at-risk members of the staff and athletics department.
And players who test positive for COVID-19 antibodies will receive an extensive workup on their heart and circulatory system to identify any lingering damage.
It’s going to be a timeconsuming, precise and costly endeavor. Herman said testing alone will cost about $250,000, with the full price tag for everything else — sanitization, screening, getting players safely to campus — “upwards of a million dollars.”
And still, it’s a near certainty that more UT athletes will test positive. All these measures might not be enough.
“This is still a time of extreme flexibility,” Herman said. “There’s still a lot of unknowns out there and we get told of decisions sometimes at the 11th hour and have to make very quick decisions based on the schedules of our players and staff and what the medical guidelines are, so on and so forth. So, it is ever changing, ever evolving.
“But up into this point, it’s gone as smooth as we could have hoped for.”