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Amid a Local Outbreak, a Historically Black University Cancels Basketball
Oct 29, 2020
The women’s basketball team at Bethune-Cookman University conducted an ordinary practice on Monday morning. The coaches spent time reviewing the fundamentals of the pack-line defense, testing the players’ knowledge of different sets. They proceeded with a lengthy scrimmage. As it turned out, the practice will be the team’s last for 2020-21. When the players convened next, on a hastily arranged conference call that afternoon, they learned their season was over. Bethune-Cookman, a historically Black university in Daytona Beach, Fla., became the first Division I school to cancel sports for the rest of the academic year because of the coronavirus pandemic. E. LaBrent Chrite, the university’s president, made the decision based on rising coronavirus rates across the state, county and especially on campus, which was locked down last week after 30 students were isolated after testing positive for the virus. The decision brings to an end the hopes that winter and spring sports like basketball, baseball, softball and track and field would be played, and also ended the hopes for football and volleyball, which were delayed from their usual fall seasons.
“We’re the first,” Vanessa Blair-Lewis, the women’s basketball coach, said of the cancellations. “But we’re not going to be the last.” Major college football has plowed forward, postponing or canceling some games and playing others amid virus outbreaks. On Wednesday, Wisconsin canceled its game with Nebraska and paused football activities after six players and six staffers, including its coach, tested positive. (Nebraska tried to book a replacement game, but its plan was rejected by its conference, the Big Ten.) Basketball, even with rosters that are far smaller than football’s, may prove thorny for its own reasons. The start of the season has been pushed back to Nov. 25, about two weeks later than planned. Basketball can be waylaid by several factors. One or two positive cases can shut down an entire team for weeks, as is happening now at Marquette, where the men’s and women’s basketball teams are in the middle of a 14-day pause after positive cases. That could mean the loss of nearly a half-dozen games during the season. Basketball also involves more travel. The Gonzaga men’s basketball team, for example, is expected to play nonconference games in the first month of the season in Fort Myers, Fla., Indianapolis and Sioux Falls, S.D.
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