8 key takeaways about USC’s plan for student-athletes to return, resume workouts
After the SEC announced that schools could bring teams back on campus in coming weeks and start voluntary athletic workouts, South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner spoke Friday with the media about the challenges and logistics of what comes next.
It’s a bear of a problem, bringing at least 100 football players and other student-athletes back on campus, putting in place a rigorous testing program, monitoring and tracking players, all while looking ahead to a future fraught with uncertainties around college athletics.
Here are some of the key takeaways from what Tanner told the media that span a variety of subjects:
▪ Football workouts will start June 8, but players will begin arriving in Columbia on June 1. Other sports will have discretion on when their players arrive back on campus. The school will also allow players to take time in returning if they want to be cautious about coming back.
“It’s not a situation that we want to force them to do anything,” Tanner said. “But we also can’t allow them to return to activity without doing the testing.”
▪ That testing is a big part of the plan for return and feeds into a larger ongoing plan. Players will have COVID-19 and antibody tests when they get to campus and have to test negative for the virus before starting workouts. After that, they’ll be broken down into clusters of four to six players who can come in and use weight rooms together. Tanner said most testing after that will be built around whether or not a player shows symptoms.
“Should a roommate, or member of his cluster test positive, the player must quarantine, or players, themselves for 14 days from the last exposure of the positive individual,” Tanner said. “Those individuals will be monitored daily by the athletic trainer.”
▪ The football team with 100 or more players is expecting mostly full participation in June. That includes the set of freshmen who have yet to enroll, as well as all returners.
The expectation is for all of them to arrive on campus within a stretch of a few days.
▪ A looming challenge comes with the potential for players to socialize both with teammates outside of their clusters and with the larger Columbia community and other students. College kids bump into other college kids in all manner of settings. As social distancing requirements loosen, bars and restaurants in town have seen an uptick in crowds.
“It’s a concern,” Tanner said, noting he’d seen pictures of large, dense gatherings at Five Points. “Young people, they tend to branch out a little bit more than maybe some of the rest of us, so that’s a concern.”
He said the staff has talked about some level of monitoring and tracking of players, and mentioned the message coming from the new incoming student body president about avoiding crowds.
▪ Early on, the workout plans project to be rather spartan. Players cannot use their locker room. They will show up at the operations building, have a daily medical check, do their workout, get food via a prepackaged box or bag, and leave. There is no chance to shower on site, watch film or hang out in the building. Tanner also noted that it’s not clear when some of the more hands-on workouts players do on their own (quarterbacks and receivers throwing, for example) can resume.
“The players can’t stay in the facility to watch tape,” Tanner said as an example. “They’ll have to go back to their dorm or their apartment and do the video work virtually. So they won’t leave the weight room and go to their position room for a video session. That will not be the case. So, there’s a still a lot of protocol in place.”
▪ The athletic department will incur many of the extra costs associated with the testing and disinfecting of facilities. Tanner said the first coronavirus test could be covered by insurance, but the antibody tests are not. Those can range from $20 to $100, he said.
“That would be an athletic department expense,” Tanner said.
▪ Tanner said there’s no timetable for conversations about cutting sports because of the financial hit the virus is having on school and athletic budgets, but he’d ideally like to avoid having to do that if possible. The department has already cut some salaries and more cuts are likely, but it’s unclear what other steps might need to be taken.
Much of that will depend on how normal the college football season can be, and many of the finer points there are yet to be decided.
“Dropping sports, is that a consideration?” Tanner said. “It has to be on your list. Is it is it high on my list? No. Is it something that I want to do? No. So it’s not an immediate priority.”
▪ A key factor on the financial front is going to be football tickets and how many people the school will be able to get into the building. Tanner had said in previous interviews that the school is modeling different scenarios, and even getting 30,000 fans in Williams-Brice would be a big ask as things stand now.
The school has already sold more than 47,000 season tickets. With all the unknowns, there’s not a great sense for how those tickets would be distributed or split up if capacity is limited.
“We’ve done some extensive work already on that,” Tanner said. “But I’m not in a position to say what it would be and what it means and who gets priority and who doesn’t. That’s still to be determined and I would hope that we’d be in a great spot come September 5, but if we aren’t, we will adjust.”
This story was originally published May 22, 2020 at 5:58 PM.
