UWM hopes protocols, hard work pay off
Lori Nickel
Hope is a dangerous thing right now. We've all lost something and have been let down during this pandemic.
So maybe it's best to leave hope to the Virtual Generation. Hope that campus will stay open. Hope that their canceled fall sports season can occur in the spring. Hope that the basketball season will somehow happen this winter. Hope for affordable, available, reliable rapid coronavirus testing. …
Hope is what is fueling the UW-Milwaukee athletic department right now.
Because the training staff is putting its student-athletes in the best position possible to stay healthy and entertain the hope that there will be competition in the coming year.
Following the City of Milwaukee and university-issued rules in one of the state's biggest COVID-19 hotspots, UWM created weird mazes of traffic
flow through buildings and limited gatherings to 50 and athletes wear masks during workouts and practice.
But it wouldn't work if the athletes weren't trying their best.
UWM's assistant athletic director and sports medicine leader Aaron Haselhorst and the staff have made big changes in their work spaces.
All athletes must fill out a self-evaluate form, answering more than a dozen questions about potential symptoms, before being allowed in to the athletic facilities.
The training room used to house 16 treatment tables, but that number has been cut in half, with the other tables spread out in other rooms.
The strength room has been marked off with workout areas, boxed off for lower-risk social distancing.
UWM invested in new, no-touch water coolers and spigots for their water and Gatorade coolers and all players are now responsible for bringing their own water bottles.
The basketball gym is limited to 50 people. It once had two or three teams working out there at once but there is a schedule now for different practice times.
There are individual cleaning and sanitizing options everywhere.
And while all of the above is standard stuff for COVID-19, this is what is remarkable: Masks are mandatory.
“If you don't want to wear a mask, you don't have to be here,” said Kelly Clements, assistant athletic trainer.
She knows the mask can make an athlete feel claustrophobic, that heart rates can elevate while wearing it. Athletes who need a break can step away from the rest of the team, more than 6 feet away, to catch their breath. They can wear whatever face covering works best for them.
The student-athletes endure them for eight hours a week while they work out and participate in non-contact drills.
We're all sick of the pandemic. But UWM is adapting and adjusting to try to make the most of 2020 and get whatever they can out of it.
When the state was under safer-athome guidelines in April, Clements worked shifts at the Orthopedic Hospital of Wisconsin and saw the patients on ventilators.
“That was extremely eye opening,” said Clements. “It was scary.
“The beeping going off, or the med alarms over the decreased oxygen. It was sad. And then when you're driving home, you see people in groups, not wearing masks and I'm like, I come from one area and people are dying and then go home and people just think it's not real."
She has no problem reminding her Panthers now how to properly train in a pandemic.
“The athletes would come in with their masks below their nose,” said Clements. “I'm the one that's says: You breathe out of your nose too. And so, you cover your nose. You cover your nose because that's going to protect me and that's going to protect the person next to you.”
While UWM is doing its best to create a micro bubble within campus, there are challenges.
It's up to the young adults to make good decisions away from it. And they're not all making good pandemic decisions. And they're testing positive. And they're getting quarantined.
“We know that they're not going to get COVID when they're on campus, because of all of our safety procedures, and we can only harp on them so much and how important it is to practice that same stuff at home, but they don't always follow it, which is sad,” said Clements, who is also a graduate of UWM.
“But they're starting to understand, when they see their peers get COVID ... people are getting quarantined every day. And when they see their peers get COVID and then they get shut down for a certain amount of time they experience those symptoms – which could be lifelong; we don't know yet – they're taking it more seriously too and trying to protect themselves and trying to protect others. It kind of sucks that they have to maybe experience it firsthand and not see it on the news.”
That said, it's still tough for those who remain strong in their vigilance to fight the pandemic.
“The coaches are a little pushy. And rightfully so,” said Clements. “They want to get their kids back. Sometimes they're trying to find loopholes and we get a little bit of push-back with our rules.
"We do a really good job of not bending.
“I'm happy about that. And I mean it's like a broken record. We're doing this for everybody's safety, including the coaches. And I know that we're taking things slower than other universities. I'm proud of that too.”
The flu season will be challenging because so many of the symptoms are similar to COVID-19, but the school has to react to all symptoms as if they're COVID-19.
After that, the hope is that the Panthers
can start competing in games. That brings a whole new challenge.
How do they handle travel. Do they split the Horizon League in to two divisions to avoid air travel?
Sports have been already placed into categories as low risk, such as track; medium risk, such as baseball and cross country; and high risk, those in which there's either direct contact within the sport, or close proximity to other athletes, men's and women's soccer, men's and women's basketball, and volleyball.
All of these athletes would be tested at varying frequencies, based on whether anyone is experiencing symptoms, or the risks.
“We'll continue to follow the guidelines that the professionals and the medical experts are lining out for us,” said Haselhorst.
“We're trying to take the best practices from the NCAA, the City of Milwaukee, the state. If we kind of merge all those guidelines we can feel that we're doing everything possible from our end to kind of mitigate the spread within our athletes.
“I've been blown away by how receptive our athletes have been with the protocols we put in place. They're not easy. But they're just kind of embracing it, because I think they really want to get back to competing, they want to get back to practice they enjoy being back on campus.
“And so I do think our athletes are doing a phenomenal job of modeling themselves in our building and outside to make sure that we can continue moving on without having any big outbreaks.
“Kudos to them. We can only kind of lay out the guidelines; if they don't follow them then it's only going to get us so far.”