Officials reflect on suspension of fall sports

On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (PSAC) pulled the plug on playing any collegiate sports for the remainder of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It wasn’t, however, a formal cancellation of the upcoming season for the 11 fall programs at West Chester. Not yet, at least. The campaigns for football, field hockey, rugby, soccer, tennis, golf and cross country are, however, on life support because the PSAC is moving forward with plans to suspend the season to the spring of 2021.

“The decision is to suspend, not cancel,” said WCU Athletic Director Terry Beattie. “That’s important to stress. No one in the world can guarantee what tomorrow is going to be like, but we will work as hard and as quickly as we can to develop a model where our athletes can compete in the next semester.”

The move, announced after a late Tuesday meeting of university presidents, was not a surprise. The recent surge in cases nationally - with big spikes in southern and western states – led to the conclusion that it was simply unsafe to move forward with plans to compete in the fall.

“It’s a difficult time for everybody,” said Beattie. “I can’t say I’m shocked that we are here. Through our planning, the realities really started to kick in.”

“In the beginning or middle of June, things were looking positive for us to play in the fall,” added WCU head football coach Bill Zwaan. “And then things started to turn. We were getting word that the presidents were getting nervous.

“We were initially told we would have an answer July 1 and then they postponed that to July 15, so that’s when we knew the reason had to be that they were re-thinking the whole thing.”

It all became a foregone conclusion late last week when West Chester President Christopher

Fiorentino announced that there would be no in-person classes at WCU for the fall semester.

“I always told our players at the end of spring and throughout the summer to keep an eye on a couple things: one was the July 1 meeting; and number two was that if we do not go back to school, we will not have sports,” Zwaan explained.

“So when the president announced there would be no classes on campus, it was kind of a fait accompli.”

Zwaan has been a head coach for 23 college seasons, including the last 17 at West Chester. His association with the sport goes all the way back to the early 1970s as a player at Delaware.

“This is unprecedented in my football career,” he said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a season cancelled or postponed.

“I remember 911 having an impact, and when the HIV crisis hit, that had an impact. And when I was a high school coach in Florida, we had a mosquito infestation and we had to change all of our night games to day games – but we didn’t cancel any games.”

The coronavirus threat forced an end to postseason NCAA action for winter sports back in mid-March, and the eventual cancellation of all spring activities.

“I am personally feeling a lot of the same emotions that I felt back in March when the spring season was ended,” Beattie said. “It is going to be difficult for all of our athletes. This impacts all of our sports.

“We are trying to develop plans and protocols for a safe return. From the beginning, whatever decisions made, the health and safety of our student-athletes is the number one priority.”

According to Zwaan, the WCU coaches were notified of the decision and were allowed time to break the news to their players before it was announced at 9 a.m. on Wednesday.

“So I had a Zoom call with the kids and the coaches [Wednesday] morning,” Zwaan said. “Most everybody already had an idea that this was going to happen.

“It was a very hard discussion. To see the looks on [our players’] faces, they were so disappointed – devastated really, especially for the older guys.”

The lone bright spot at a time shrouded in darkness for college athletics is the prospect of staging fall sports in the spring of 2021. And for coaches like Zwaan, those hopes are fragile but important.

“It’s a hope that our players have to grab onto right now because that is all that they’ve got,” he said.

“It’s our goal right now,” Beattie confirmed. “We are committed as a conference to what I am referring to as a ‘spring model,’ which is January

through May, where we will be providing competitive opportunities for all of our 24 sports during that time frame.”

It would be quite a feat to pull off, but it’s a task that most athletic administrators welcome, as long as it can be done in a manner that assures the health and safety of those involved.

“I do think that they are being honest when they say that they are trying to make it happen so that nobody misses a season,” Zwaan pointed out. “But they’ve had positive thoughts before that have fallen apart. So I also have to be realistic that it is more of a hope than anything definite right now.”

Beattie and Zwaan acknowledge that if the move is to take place, it would almost certainly necessitate abbreviated schedules for most fall sports. There is an array of logistical issues, of course, that must be addressed.

“It’s too early to say, but having 24 sports competing in a five-month time frame, certainly abbreviated seasons are likely,” Beattie said. “It’s too early to say how abbreviated. We want to provide the best experience we can.”

Zwaan envisions a spring football season where the Rams line up against PSAC East Division foes Shippensburg, Shepherd, East Stroudsburg, Millersville, Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Kutztown, and nobody else. And he sees it sandwiched

somewhere between the tail end of the winter season and the early weeks of the spring season, with as little crossover as possible.

“I think what we may see is football being played on Sundays so it won’t conflict with Friday and Saturday for sports like baseball and basketball,” he said.

“But it’s going to be an abbreviated season for sure if we play in the spring. We might play all of the PSAC East teams and then have a championship weekend - so maybe eight games in total. But all of this is very preliminary.”

One of the major challenges with a ‘spring model’ is logistical, and it has to do with the threat of stretching resources too thin. Most of the 24 sports at WCU share facilities like weight rooms, as well as personnel, like athletic trainers.

“We can’t have trainers working 16 hour days,” Zwaan said.

“There will be challenges with staffing facilities,” Beattie acknowledged, “but I strongly believe those are things we can work through. I think I can speak for everybody at West Chester when I say that we are committed to providing an experience that is as positive as we can.

“Will that experience be different that in the past? Absolutely, but we are going to overcome the challenges that lay in front of us, at least the ones that we can control.

“There’s a lot in this situation we have no control over.”