Pandemic has transformed the college experience COVID-19 is putting the student Reopenings have schools back into student-athlete marching toward the cliff
COVID-19 is poised to overhaul the college sports playing field. With all the uncertainty surrounding fall sports, with the Big Ten and Pac-12 delaying all competition, the intercollegiate sports business model is ripe for structural changes. The #Weareunited movement is symptomatic of the discontent, frustration and concern among student athletes.
Student-athletes are ready to begin competition. For winter and spring sports, COVID-19 cut short their season and their championships, including the abrupt cancellation of March Madness. Fall sports delays further exacerbate the situation. Many studentathletes attend school on an athletic scholarship. For nonrevenue sports without a professional league waiting in the wings, intercollegiate competition represents the last chance for most to display their skills and talent on the court or field.
Revenue sports like football and men’s basketball (and for some schools, hockey and baseball) sit in a unique position. They drive athletic department budgets, with rosters at power conference teams filled with talented blue chip high school recruits. Many of these players aspire to win conference titles and national championships, hoping to earn a place on professional team rosters, here or abroad, and cash in (literally) on their athletic skills and talent.
COVID-19 threatens such dreams. Asymptomatic virus transmission can lead to multiple infections on a team, forcing the best players to sit out several games, or worse yet, games forfeited if enough players become infected. The timing of these infections during a season can make the difference between a winning or losing record.
Then there is the issue of post-season play. With so much roster uncertainty, and both the Big Ten and Pac-12 not playing, it is more challenging to select teams for the Football Bowl Series playoffs, or select and seed basketball teams on Selection Sunday.
Given the age and general good health of student-athletes, the overall COVID-19 risk to them is negligible. For those who recovered from COVID-19, it would be advisable to screen for myocarditis risk. The greater risk lies with their coaches. For example, among the 65 power conference basketball teams, there are over 40 men’s and women’s head coaches 55 years of age and older, with 12 coaches over 65. Coaching team sports does not translate well onto the virtual instruction world, where hands-on game preparation and guidance is critical.
Moreover, an asymptomatic student-athlete who inadvertently spreads the virus to an older coach, who ends up hospitalized, or even worse, dies, places an enormous emotional burden on the student, with implications for the rest of their lives.
Winning championships and securing multimillion-dollar professional contracts was a goal of the most talented student-athletes when they chose their school. In reality, very few will have such financial opportunities. The one opportunity that the virus cannot eliminate for them is their education, be it in person or online. COVID-19 might have spurred on the #Weareunited movement, but the erosion of the student component in student-athlete is at its core. Whether student-athletes ever step onto the court or field this year, the opportunity to learn and grow their minds remains available. Their college education is something they will carry with them far beyond their playing days.
The coronavirus is changing priorities. Over 166,000 Americans already have died from the virus. Many more grieve the loss of loved ones. Lives have dramatically changed.
For many student-athletes with professional aspirations, winning games and championships and securing multimillion dollar contracts can be lifechanging events for themselves and their families. A college education also is a life-changing steppingstone. It enriches one’s perspective and provides opportunities for personal growth.
COVID-19 might be uncovering the proper role of college sports, reminding us and returning us all to what it was intended to be.
We should all stand united with #Weareunited to put the student back into student-athlete.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, PH.D., is a founder professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbanachampaign. He is the founder of Bracketodds, a STEM learning laboratory at the University of Illinois, focused on the analytics of March Madness.
Imagine you’re in an unfamiliar wilderness. A friend comes up to you and asks you to walk with him toward a cliff that you both can see in the near distance. He tells you he’s pretty sure there’s a bridge to the other side, but you and he will have to get very close to the edge of the cliff to find it, the bridge itself is damaged and won’t be repaired for quite a while, and there’s a chance you’ll both fall in.
Would you walk off toward the edge of the cliff with your friend?
Many of us might start following the friend, but when it became clear that the ground near the edge of the cliff was unstable and that the bridge was more damaged than we thought, we’d probably stop and try to convince the friend to give up his desire to cross the chasm.
This is essentially what many colleges and universities around the country are asking of their students, their students’ families and their home communities: walk with them toward a dangerous cliff in the hope that we all can make it safely to the other side.
Most Ohio colleges are planning to reopen for at least some in-person classes in less than a month. This means collecting on their campuses thousands of students from across the nation and the world in the midst of a raging pandemic, at a time when local contagion, hospitalization and fatality rates are trending in the wrong direction. Unlike reopening K-12 schools, which draw their populations locally, college reopenings are long-distance COVID-19 vector churns. And yet they are being planned as though they’re not only necessary but inevitable.
They’re neither. Reopening residential colleges is a choice, one being made out of a conflict of interests, and one we all need to stop and rethink while there’s still time.
A great deal of effort and ingenuity have been applied by committees of smart, well-intentioned college administrators and consultants to devise a grim parody of campus life (mask requirements, “de-densifying” classes and dorms, pooled testing, self-diagnostic apps, isolation and quarantine spaces, and on and on) in order to make reopening their campuses seem feasible. And if all goes perfectly and their students all behave like monks and sages, their efforts will be vindicated. But like all battle plans, it’s unlikely these will survive first contact with the enemy – in this case, the reallife behavior of adolescents in a campus setting.
This immense amount of planning has its own momentum, making it difficult to change, much less reverse, course. Forget herd immunity. This is herd mentality. Like NFL owners and the heads of various college football conferences, no college president wants to be the first in his or her peer group to raise a hand, declare the emperor to be buck naked and postpone reopening until a more prudent time. So the entire group continues toward the cliff edge.
Why? Just as in the case of the football season, the decision to reopen colleges is primarily about money. This doesn’t make it inherently wrong, but it does require some candor about the conflict of interests at play. For many colleges, tuition defrays well over half of their annual budgets, and to lose a significant portion of that expected income because of a semester’s hiatus could mean anything from serious fiscal pain to outright financial crisis.
Moreover, colleges will be obliged to increase financial aid to more students as a result of the economic impact of the pandemic, at the same time that alumni donations to colleges will likely decline. The result will be multiyear deficits at many institutions and closures of some that were already at financial risk.
Weigh against all that the very real possibility of an outbreak in a dorm that spreads quickly across campus and into the surrounding community of older adults, and you have some sense of the conflicting interests under which college officials are laboring in the time of COVID-19.
We who are neighbors and alumni of the colleges and universities we love should relieve their administrators of the conflict they’re struggling with by saying, through our elected officials, a flat “no” to reopening their campuses this year. Then we should dig into our public coffers and personal accounts to support the collegiate rebuilding process that will surely follow in the years to come.
Keith Mcwalter of Granville is an attorney and alumnus of Denison University.