AAC may let Olympic sports play more regional teams
As college athletic departments across the country continue to wrestle with harsh economic problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic, school leaders have embraced out-of-the-box thinking.
One possible solution discussed involves schools turning to regional scheduling for their Olympic sports.
“We’re trying to figure out a regional way to schedule Olympic sports down the road,” America Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said. “We’ve had some discussions about it, not extensive yet. It’s something that’s gaining traction and something we’re going to investigate.”
The AAC wrapped up its annual spring meetings this week with numerous topics to discuss. While the majority of the conversation centered around handling COVID-19, some of the focus centered on the ramifications of the virus on college sports.
Some programs were forced to cut nonrevenue sports, in part, because of the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament and the loss of ticket sales and donor gifts.
“I think long term, it’s something that makes a lot of sense,” Aresco said. “Our schools are seeing whether they can schedule them effectively. Whether they
can schedule within their region and some may want to go outside their region because they may feel for the RPI or they want to play certain teams.
“We also don’t want to abandon conference play, per se. You can always rely on conference teams for games.”
Some benefits of allowing member institutions to schedule some of their sports regionally would be less wear-andtear on the athletes themselves.
“Temple doesn’t have to go to Wichita for a particular kind of sport or they don’t have to go to Tulsa or Houston,” said Aresco. “Same thing with UCF. Maybe they don’t have to go to Tulsa or Memphis. Maybe they can play more regionally, and they can play teams that have programs that are strong in areas that we’re strong in and we also can save money on travel.
“The concept is relatively simple: your Olympic sports play as independents. They set up their schedule and they don’t necessarily have to play a conference schedule.”
Aresco believes NCAA bylaws would allow such scheduling, although it might require a few waivers down the road. He adds the league may not wish to do regional scheduling with all Olympic sports, choosing to keep a sport such as baseball at the conference level.
And even if the league did decide to move toward this type of scheduling, Aresco said he doesn’t believe it would result in the elimination of conference championships.
“We have no plans to do that right now,” he said. “In fact, if anything, we would like to preserve the championships. If we did this regional scheduling, we could preserve the championships and seed people based on how they did in their regular seasons. The regular seasons you would have flexibility. Down the road, could we tweak our championships? We just don’t know yet.”
The earliest the league could make such a move would be the 2021-22 season.
“There’s a new paradigm. We’ve always looked at trying to save money in this area, but it’s always been in the paradigm of conference play. But if you go outside of that paradigm, maybe it would work,” Aresco said.
RETURNING TO CAMPUSES: While some conferences such as the SEC, Big 12 and Pac-12 have chosen to institute specific dates as to when their member schools can bring back athletes for voluntary workouts, the AAC has let each school decide its plans.
UCF, for instance, has chosen June 1 as the date it will start bringing football players back to campus for testing and safety education.
“We’ve left the initial health and safety protocols up to them,” Aresco said of AAC schools. “They’re getting the best medical advice on their campuses and local communities. … There may well be testing as people come back on campus, but we’re leaving that up to them. It’s complicated and varies from region to region right now.”
That said, the league created a COVID-19 Medical Advisory Group, which includes medical professionals from each school. The consortium has been working with the Centers for Disease Control and state and federal health agencies to come up with protocols for the upcoming football season.
“We also have a medical advisory group set up to determine how we’re going to deal with the competition itself,” Aresco said. “What kind of testing protocols we’re going to have? But when it comes time to play, we’ve got a medical advisory group that’s advising us and putting in various protocols in sanitation, hygiene, testing, travel, meals … anything involving competition and they’re going to have a valuable role to play.”