In rush back to campus, colleges asking athletes to trust them with their lives
RALEIGH, N.C. — The plan to return athletes to campus that North Carolina announced Friday is clear, reasonable and straightforward, even if its implementation, like everything else, essentially remains hostage to the whims and vagaries of a virus that remains poorly understood.
The general lack of ongoing testing for COVID-19 outlined therein — one test upon arrival and another 7-8 days later — stands out compared to the more comprehensive (and expensive) plans professional leagues have considered, or announced, in the case of the National Women’s Soccer League, which only underlines the inherent dynamic here.
North Carolina and all of the other universities to follow with similar plans are shouldering a great responsibility as they attempt to maintain a safe environment for athletes who will be living on and off campus and interacting with coaches and staff who continue to move about the community.
The legal doctrine of in loco parentis — “in the place of the parent” — as it applies to colleges died out in the 1960s, but it was always more about dominance and control than safekeeping. The attempt to revive college athletics amid a pandemic should give that latter aspect of in loco parentis new life.
If there is going to be training, let alone competition, under these circumstances, then colleges really are assuming the place of the parent when it comes to the safety of these athletes.
As colleges announce their plans to bring athletes back over the next few months, they are asking those athletes to make a great leap of faith: that a plan like this will keep them safe from a disease whose short-term implications remain grave and long-term consequences remain unknown, even for the otherwise-healthy who become afflicted, let alone those at higher risk.
North Carolina is essentially asking its athletes to put their lives in the school’s hands, as will every college as they attempt not only to shove college athletics back into being but college itself.
There’s always an aspect of that in college athletics, given the inherent risk to life and limb of a sport like football. The stakes are infinitely higher when it comes to an acute threat like COVID-19, and there’s a long, long history of universities not always acting in the best interests of their athletes, in everything from concussion care to preventable heat-related deaths and injuries, to overtraining leading to rhabdomyolysis, a syndrome that can cause organ failure.
Across the country, a few athletes will presumably decline to return, whether they are immunocompromised or otherwise at higher risk for complications from COVID-19 or just decide it’s not worth the risk. That would be an almost impossibly difficult and heart-wrenching decision to make now that schools have laid out the runway for return. The number who choose that option will surely be very small.
And what of the actual parents? They will have a say here as well. Surely some will balk at shifting this much responsibility onto the schools. What a difficult decision this must be, to send your child into the unknown with only a plan like this for succor.
North Carolina’s plan makes a lot of sense. It’s straightforward. It has clearly been thought through. And it inevitably remains at the mercy of whatever may happen with the virus over the next three months, as the old sage Mike Tyson once said of plans and punches in the mouth.