Suggestions become rules, impacts are considered, and another collegiate sports conference pushes its fall sports to the spring.
That was the case Thursday when the Mountain East Conference’s Board of Directors announced a number of decisions, chief of which was the postponement of fall sports to Spring 2021.
“I pledged to our board, administrators, athletics staffs, and most importantly to our student-athletes that we would exhaust every opportunity to stage competition this fall, and I am confident that is collectively what we have done within the MEC,” said Commissioner Reid Amos.
“Present public health challenges, combined with the new mandates put forth by the NCAA last week, create too great of a challenge on too short of a timeline to be able to conduct meaningful competition for our fall sports.”
Others moves approved by the board include:
- Suspend competition for winter sports until no earlier than November 1, 2020.
- Suspend all competition in all sports indefinitely, with MEC board review by no later than Oct. 15, 2020.
- Suspend the indoor track and field championship for the 2020-21 season.
- All countable athletically related activities (CARA), excluding the restrictions regarding outside competition, for all MEC sports are permissible (as allowed under NCAA rules and Board of Governors requirements) at the discretion of each MEC member institution.
“I have a great deal of empathy for the student-athletes and the impact this will have on them personally,” said Wheeling University president Ginny Favede in a released statement. “Our student-athletes, coaches, and staff have worked tirelessly over the last five months to overcome the many challenges during these times, and I extremely proud of what our athletics department has accomplished.
“We certainly hope that our fall teams will be able to return to competition in the new year.”
The Final Straw
Up until recently, the MEC had every intention of continuing with fall sports.
But the NCAA Board of Governors issues a recent directive that dictated specifically how member institutions had to go about safeguarding their student athletes, along with the cancellation of fall sports championships at the NCAA level, ultimately led to the decision.
Institutions were instructed the recommended Resocialization of Collegiate Sport standards must be followed.
A big sticking point in those standards pertained to the extensive frequency and number of tests required for high contact sports like football.
The move was done in effort to protect health and safety. But the cost of said moves is what ultimately forced the conference’s hand.
“We felt very confident in the plans we had developed after days and days of meetings,” Amos said. “But when the NCAA turned guidelines into requirements, it now required us to be treated in the same fashion as areas of the country that had done poorly in containing the spread and circumstances forced us to delay.”
Amos noted that the majority of MEC institutions lie within the borders of West Virginia, a state that hasn’t seen the types of positive testing results that other states both regionally and national have experienced.
But once those mandates were made universal across the board, the success of West Virginia in comparison to others no longer mattered.
“The mandate for testing in particular made it financially impossible,” “Amos said. “Another aspect is the NCAA basically placed liabilities back on the member institutions athletic departments … that was also seen as a major hurdle to return.”
The NCAA earlier ruled plays could not be made to sign a waiver absolving members institutions of liability in the event of a positive test related to sports participation.
Questions of Eligibility
While fall sports moved to the spring may still compete, those sports will not be able to compete for NCAA championships.
That were canceled altogether in a move by the governing body.
In Division II, the administration committee agreed that any athlete that competes in no more than 50 percent of the allowable number of games for his or her sports in 2020-21 will not lose a year of eligibility.
The MEC is working to ensure while competition does take place in the spring, that year of eligibility is not consumed by its athletes who already are experiencing a major disruption to their athletic lives.
In football, for example, there will be an MEC championship game. Member schools will play a modified five-game regular season, with the top two teams squaring off in a championship game.
Some sense of a season will be salvaged. But eligibility will not be consumed in the process.
“Our intention was to develop an MEC football championship game in a five plus one scenario,” Amos said during a Zoom meeting with media members Thursday.
