CHAMPAIGN — The 14 Big Ten athletic directors had an already scheduled meeting Wednesday afternoon in Indianapolis to coincide with the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament.
That meeting had a prearranged agenda that ultimately never played out.
One topic of conservation rightly dominated.
Not quite 24 hours after that meeting, the Big Ten canceled the men’s basketball tournament in response to the public health threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. By the end of the day Thursday, the NCAA had moved to cancel all of its remaining winter and spring championships, and the Big Ten had canceled all of its remaining athletic events through the end of the academic year.
“As I left the meeting in Indianapolis on Wednesday, I felt like this was almost the inevitable conclusion of where this might go,” Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman said Friday morning during a press conference with Illinois men’s basketball coach Brad Underwood at State Farm Center.
Conversations about the novel coronavirus COVID-19 started happening within the DIA in the past three weeks.
Once it started to gain more national attention and the campus as a whole devoted attention to it, the necessity for potential contingency plans developed during that time.
“Certainly we had done a lot of the things you would expect in terms of encouraging our student-athletes to be mindful of physical contact and their cleanliness habits,” Whitman said. “Obviously, it’s ratcheted up fairly significantly over the last week in particular. I don’t know that any of us anticipated it would get to this place.”
Whitman re-emphasized what Thursday’s decision to cancel all remaining athletic events meant.
Cancel is the pertinent word. There will be no competition through the remainder of the academic year.
No practices. No organized team activities, which could include meetings, film sessions, weightlifting and workouts.
Illinois made those decisions, including the suspension of practice and all other team activities on Thursday.
The Big Ten followed Friday morning with the announcement that organized team activities would be suspended for all programs in the conference until April 6. A re-evaluation of the situation would happen at that time, but only for the potential resumption of organized team activities.
“Certainly the competition thing is final,” Whitman said. “That’s not going to get changed. We recognize there’s a lot that goes into the planning and preparation for the travel and officials and event staff and all the other things that go into hosting games or traveling to participate in games.
“Whether there would be an opportunity to revisit the practice conversation or the organized team activity conversation? Sure. We’re never going to say never, but based on the information that I have and my admittedly relatively limited understanding of what’s happening in the world around, I don’t think, given that we’re sitting here in the middle of March and the semester ends in roughly six weeks, I don’t know that we’ll see significant change during that window.
“We’d be having a very different conversation if this was all happening in September. The reality is we’re so close to the end of the school year already, that in my mind it made sense to take the full bite.”
Illinois’ decision to suspend its practices and organized team activities before the Big Ten mandate was student-athlete driven. As in, not creating a situation where the message from the athletic programs deviated from the message from the university as a whole.
“We want to be sure our student-athletes are in position to comply with those policies and follow the directives that are coming to our entire student body without concern for their status as a student-athlete,” Whitman said. “That we’re not putting in place a situation where they have to choose what the university is telling them to do and what they’re being asked to do by our athletic program or by our coaching staffs.
“We want to be sure they have a clear path to make good choices for their own health and the health of their families and their campus that aren’t affected by what they feel are obligations to the athletic department. We tried to remove any of those barriers.”
Spring break officially starts for the university Monday.
Instruction upon its completion will be online only. Some Illinois student-athletes, though, will remain on campus, according to Whitman.
Those that will remain include student-athletes who are recovering from surgery or are in the midst of rehabilitation and need closer attention from the athletic training and sports medicine staffs. Some international student-athletes or those where it makes more sense to be on campus than go home will also stay. So will some student-athletes that might benefit from more in-person academic support.
Whitman said the full group of student-athletes that will remain on campus is still being determined.
“For those student-athletes who are here, we will continue to provide access to our support services,” he said. “We’ll still have weight rooms available. We’ll still have our athletic training room available. We’ll have our academic services center available and our varsity room. All of these things are subject to change depending on how things continue to develop at the campus level.
“Those services will be scaled back. Hours will be limited. We’ll probably try to condense our facilities down. Instead of operating six weight rooms, we may operate two so that we can focus our resources on making sure that those spaces remain sanitary and clean.”
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All spring sports — practices included — come to a halt on UI campus - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette
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