Sports

Cal Survived Covid. Now, Back to Its Usual Problems


BERKELEY, Calif. — The football and men’s basketball seasons were long over, but other sports at the University of California, Berkeley, were in full array — water polo in the pool, rowing in the estuary, baseball on the diamond.

The Covid-19 pandemic had thrown most fall and winter sports into the spring, erecting logistical hurdles across campus. About two dozen teams and hundreds of athletes vied simultaneously in April for fields, courts, pools and arenas. Locker rooms, like most of Cal’s classrooms the entire school year, remained closed. Trainers and other support staff were spread thin.

Things were hopping. They were not normal.

On the last Saturday of April, the women’s lacrosse team held its final home game of the season at Memorial Stadium, where the football team plays in the fall. It was Senior Day. There were more players on the field than fans in the stands.

One by one, the seniors were introduced through the loudspeakers, their smiling mugs posted on the big stadium scoreboard, to a smattering of applause. With no parents around — too many restrictions — each was escorted onto the field by a teammate. They walked through a tunnel of raised lacrosse sticks held by others. And then they played Stanford, their rival, in a taut contest.

“You can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Knowlton said. “We just don’t know exactly how long the tunnel is.”

There is concern that the pandemic is not over. Cases are spiking in other countries, and Cal and the Bay Area are diverse with global connections. On the same weekend that Knowlton watched lacrosse, the softball team canceled a four-game series over positive tests.

No one in the Cal athletic department has died from Covid-19; since early fall, the department has conducted nearly 25,000 polymerase chain reaction tests, with 86 positive results, the school said. That scoreboard is the one tracked most closely.

The pandemic forced a singular focus, a survival mentality. But all the ills of college sports never went away. They await full attention again, on the other end of that tunnel.

“The landscape of athletics is wacked right now,” Knowlton said.

At times, it feels like the entire N.C.A.A. model, with billions of dollars of revenues built on an anachronistic notion of amateurism across hundreds of universities, could tumble down like a house of cards — or a pile of multimillion dollar coaching contracts, television deals, arcane rules and paper diplomas.

Cal tackled the pandemic with a military bent. Knowlton is a retired Army colonel, a West Point graduate who taught engineering. Before coming to Cal in 2018, he was athletic director at Division III Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then at Air Force.

The usual rhythm of the college sports calendar were mashed into a grinder of hope and uncertainty. Teams completed schedules and went to postseason championships with few problems and little notice.

Were there winners and losers in college sports in the past year, and how is that measured?

Few of Cal’s seasons went particularly well in terms of wins and losses, but the standings felt less important that usual. No coaches were fired. No sports were cut. Those are victories.

“I think we did right,” Knowlton said. “It was hard. Our staff is really whupped, because we’ve been at this since last March, trying to prepare.”

Most of Cal’s staff have not had vacations. Athletes have had nothing normal about their school years. The plan — one of them — is to get people rested in June, prepared for whatever comes next.

Even if the pandemic feels over by the fall, all of the other problems with college sports will still be there.



Sahred From Source link Sports

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *