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Football coaches get creative, while experts caution about exercise equipment use.
Two medical professionals helping the college sports world sort through the coronavirus pandemic offered cautionary words in terms of what athletes can do since team activities have been halted and what athletic programs might be able to do weeks and months from now.
During a live conversation Friday evening on the NCAA’s Twitter channel, the association’s chief medical officer recommended that athletes not engage in any activity that involves sharing a ball or other equipment and that they not train with more than one other person.
As part of the same conversation, a former U. S. surgeon general – while discussing decision- making that resulted in the NCAA canceling championship events scheduled for mid- June – offered observations that illustrate why there already is anxiety about the upcoming football season.
Chief medical officer Brian Hainline noted there remains considerable uncertainty about how long the new coronavirus can remain intact on “an inanimate surface such as a ball.”
He said he’s found that NCAA athlete representatives have demonstrated a strong sense of social responsibility about the pandemic, “and with that, you should assume that any person is potentially infectious.
“So if you can exercise with someone else in a field and you’re doing your burpees, you’re doing your sprints, you’re doing your pushups and so forth, that’s fine,” Hainline said. “But sharing a ball is right now off- limits. …
“You may be with a family member that you’ve been with for a few weeks, and if you’ve been in that same house for more than a couple of weeks, well, that’s a situation when you may be able to do so. But otherwise, it’s considered off- limits.
“That goes the same for things like sharing dumbbells, sharing weights or you’re sharing the same chin- up bar,” Hainline said. “If you’re doing that, you need to presume that someone’s hand – because we frequently touch our face – they potentially have an infectious droplet. And if they’re touching an object, that has to be sanitized before you use it.
“So it is tricky. It can be done in some group settings – groups of two if you do everything properly.”
Meanwhile, conferences and schools continue to assess the types of activities they are allowing and when they might be able to reassess. Spring sports seasons already have been canceled. On Friday afternoon, the Big Ten Conference announced it is extending its suspension of all organized team activities in all sports through May 4 and will reevaluate at that time.
Vivek Murthy, a former surgeon general who now serves as an independent member of the NCAA’s board of governors, said the association canceled spring championships when it became apparent the pandemic had reached the United States and people “realized that this is a longer- term prospect to address this virus. It’s not going to be a few weeks.
“That is why, ultimately, so many of these events were pulled down even though they were happening a few months down the line.”
Murthy also said the United States has the benefit of seeing what happened in countries in Asia that experienced the coronavirus first. But his observations might concern administrators trying to look ahead.
“If you look closely at those countries, what you see is that even when extreme measures were implemented, including social distancing, closing down businesses, testing really broadly to ensure we knew exactly where the infection was – even when those were instituted broadly in those countries – it took several months for things to get to the point where the number of new cases was really small. And at that point, the countries then felt comfortable slowly starting to ease back into physical proximity and getting businesses up and running again.
“Now if we think about the United States, what we know is that we have been a little bit behind when it came to responding to this. It took us awhile to ramp up the response. … As result of that, we weren’t able to jump on it as quickly as some of the other countries. So what we should expect is that it will take at least as much time as they took – if not maybe a little longer – to really tamp this down and get it under control.
“If you recognize that, and also recognize that there’s a one- to two- week lag between the numbers we’re seeing in terms of positive cases and when people are getting infected, you start to realize that we’ve got to be thinking of this not just as something that may last a couple weeks, but as something that could last a few months.”