San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Stanford reward — the heart of Texas
The Stanford women are on a roll. This past week, the 242 basketball team crushed two opponents and steamrolled into Sunday’s Pac12 title game. The Cardinal will be a top seed in the upcoming NCAA Tournament. Stanford’s reward?
A trip of potentially almost three weeks to Texas. Right now, that seems like more a booby prize than a reward.
After spending the past three months bobbing and weaving around the coronavirus, doublemasking and isolating and following strict protocols, Tara Van-Derveer’s team is going to a place where people — mistakenly — seem to think the pandemic is over.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently announced that he was lifting the state mask mandate, beginning this Wednesday because, by golly, Texans have done such a good job of staying safe.
That’s despite the reality of the numbers: Vaccinations in Texas trail the national average by a wide margin, new variants continue to appear, and Texas remains a state with one of the highest numbers of cases and where deaths are on the rise. Half of the New York Times’ list of top 10 places that remain hardest hit by the virus are in Texas.
Everyone from public health officials to city mayors to President Biden to San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich pushed back against Abbott’s decision, which comes just as most
indicators are moving in the right direction. This seems the worst point to stop being vigilant.
Biden called the mandatelifting “Neanderthal thinking.” Popovich termed it “ridiculous” and said it thwarted the goals of businesses that want to do the right thing.
“They’re trying to do a good job of keeping everybody safe,” Popovich said. “Of course they want to open up. But getting rid of masks just seems ignorant to me.”
Add VanDerveer’s voice to the chorus.
“I would agree with Coach Popovich,” she said. “I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to keep wearing masks when it’s proven that it helps you stay healthy.
“I’m not the governor. But we’re wearing our masks. … I don’t think they have a rule that you wear a mask.”
Well, it is Texas, so they might have a rule like that by the time the Cardinal get there.
One of the unfair aspects of the pandemic has been that, somehow, the states doing the worst job on containing the coronavirus have managed to be rewarded with the economic prize of hosting sporting events. Hot spots Arizona and Florida are hosting spring training.
And now San Antonio will host the prized women’s basketball tournament. The decision to play all the games in the same geographic area was made last month, in direct acknowledgment that the pandemic is not over, and travel needed to be limited and venues uniformly controlled. And San Antonio, already slated to host the 2021 Final Four, was the logical choice.
“We were already there, and we were looking for a community that could manage the event,” said Rick Nixon, the NCAA’s associate director of media services. “We have great familiarity with the local organizing group. We figured we could do a safe event.”
Nixon didn’t sound thrilled about the governor’s announcement but doesn’t think it will change the event.
“I don’t think we have any regrets at all,” he said. “We haven’t changed any direction on what we’re doing. They can say no masks, but for our event masks will still be required, teams will be separated, there will be different tiers of testing levels. Nothing has changed. It’s full steam ahead.”
Nothing will change for the Cardinal either. Team members have become experts at following protocol, after they spent nine weeks on the road because of
Santa Clara County restrictions. They are playing like a team on a mission, with a clear shot at the title, and they are committed to not letting the virus derail them, not at this point.
“Our team has worked really hard,” VanDerveer said. “I double mask, our staff all double masks, our team all double masks. I’m hopeful that everyone we’re around will mask. Or we won’t be around them.”
“Even if our family and fans are here, they are in their own separate world,” she said, speaking from Las Vegas, site of the Pac12 tournament, where limited fans are allowed. “We don’t mix with them. They don’t come to our hotel, we don’t meet up with them in restaurants.”
Only friends and family will be allowed to watch the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament. Each member of a team’s 34person traveling party can get up to six tickets, so there could potentially be 400 people at each game. Beginning with the Round of 16, the Alamodome (capacity 72,000) will open to 17% of capacity.
But Abbott’s mandate means that the workers inside the arena may face problems when it comes to asking fans to behave in a safe manner. Again, a public health safety request has become politically weaponized.
“They will be asked to wear masks to spectate,” Nixon said. “It’s going to be something we have to work with.”
Some women’s basketball teams with dreams of making the NCAA Tournament had to cancel their seasons because of COVID19 safety issues. Others have had multiple games canceled. For all, it has been a season like no other. VanDerveer has told her players that their middle name is “flexible.”
And the Stanford team is determined that, even in a state where the governor thinks magically declaring the pandemic over makes it so, it will keep all eyes on the ultimate goal.
“Our team has been very disciplined,” VanDerveer said. “We’ve worked very hard to get here. We are focused on playing well.
“We do not want to test positive.”