The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
NCAA makes no ruling on status of fall titles
Universities from coast to coast braced for the worst when the NCAA Board of Governors met Friday to discuss the fall sports season.
The very real possibility existed of calling off the fall sports national tournaments but instead, the board opted not to make a decision on the fall championships.
Most of the Division I conferences, including all of those at the Power Five level, asked the Board of
Governors to delay canceling the fall championships until there was more clarity on what the majority of the DI conferences planned to do regarding the fall sports season.
“Today the Board of Governors and I agreed that we must continue to thoughtfully and aggressively monitor health conditions around the country and the implementation of the COVID-19 guidelines we issued last week,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said in a release.
“The health and wellbeing of college athletes is the highest priority in deciding whether to proceed with our 22 NCAA championships beginning in late November. We all remain deeply concerned about the infection trend lines we see. It is clear that the format of our championships will have to change if they are to be conducted in a safe and fair manner. We discussed other complexities in addition to the health and safety impacts, to include team availability, travel limitations and various local and state restrictions. We will continue our discussions in August.”
Another meeting is scheduled for Aug. 4, so that allows the NCAA to gather more information before making a call on the tournaments.
The MAAC, which made the decision not to have its men’s and women’s soccer and women’s volleyball programs play nonconference games, could have made a more significant move had the NCAA pulled the plug on tournaments when the conference’s pres
idents had a call after the NCAA wrapped up their conference.
While no movement was made on tournament play, there was news from the Division III level Friday.
Two more DIII conferences announced there
won’t be any competition during the fall semester. With the Ohio Athletic Conference joining the Middle Athletic Conference, 13-time DIII national championship football program Mount Union is among those that won’t have a championship to pursue in the fall.
The GNAC and NESCAC are among the DIII conferences
to already announce that no sports would be played during the fall semester, which impacted Albertus Magnus, Connecticut College, Trinity, the University of Saint Joseph and Wesleyan.
WestConn had the football season suspended after the MASCAC announced the cancellation of conference competition for fall
sports. Including the entire football slate, 59 of 99 scheduled events for WestConn during the fall season have been canceled or postponed, even before the announcement from the NCAA.