The past few days have featured basketball coaches for NCAA-member institutions that compete at the D1 level make statements. For two out of the three highlighted here, those statements were problematic at best.
For another, the actions of the athlete-employees she works alongside did all the speaking for her. However, even in that scenario, positive actions may have come too late.
If regret was an effective vaccine
Last week, Detroit Mercy’s men’s basketball team had an opponent withdraw from a game due to COVID-19 protocols. The athletic department scrambled to find a new opponent to fill the game slot. They found Oakland, which had also had a similar situation with its then-most recent scheduled opponent bowing out for the same reason.
Oakland had just played the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of the two referees in that game tested positive for the virus. That news compromised the weekend doubleheader that Detroit and Oakland planned for this past Saturday and Sunday.
Detroit head coach Mike Davis went on the record after the games, criticizing the Horizon League’s COVID-19 protocols. Aside from his calling the legal adults he coaches “kids,” there’s a huge problem with his comments.
“To put my guys in this situation was really disappointing to me,” Davis said. “We expressed all of that. I'm responsible for these kids, and for us to be in this situation is unbelievable. This is life or death. I feel really awful and bad for putting my guys in this situation. Really bad.”
The question begs to be asked: if Davis’ concern for safety was so significant that he was willing to call out the conference his employer belongs to on the record, why did he go along with playing the games? The comment comes off as blame-shifting. However, Davis’ comment about the legitimacy of the Horizon League’s COVID-19 protocols is spot-on.
Failure on the Horizon
It’s possible that Detroit athletic director Robert Vowels may have overridden Davis to go ahead with the games. Vowels refused an interview request but cited Horizon League protocols in his decision to proceed.
Horizon League protocols seem vague and weak, however. For one thing, they assume that once a player contracts the virus, he is immune from that point forward. The amount of evidence that contraction does not provide significant immunity is still mounting.
When reviewing game film from the Oakland-UIC game to see which players had sustained proximity with the referee who tested positive, they eliminated players who had already tested positive for the virus. That’s over half of the current roster for Oakland, by the way.
Furthermore, because none of the players spent more than 15 minutes in close proximity to the infected referee within that 24-hour period, the Horizon League didn’t require Oakland to isolate any players. That completely ignores droplet transmission, which is completely possible in basketball indoors.
On top of sweat droplets in the air, referees hold their whistles in their mouths. They then touch those whistles with their hands. From there, they touch the same basketball that players touch.
The Horizon League protocols also completely ignore virus incubation periods. The latest guidance says that for accurate testing after a possible transmission, it’s best to wait at least two days. In some people, there may not be sufficient buildup of the viral antibodies to produce an accurate result for as much as 14 days.
That means when Oakland players tested negative just before playing UIC, there’s a chance those test results could have been faulty. Davis also had a bone to pick with the communication. He said they did not find out about the referee testing positive from the conference or UIC but rather from a secondhand source.
Finally, the discrepancy in the protocol for coming into contact with an infected person on the court as a referee and an infected person on the court as a coach, player, or trainer is horrible. Had a member of Oakland’s roster or staff tested positive, the Horizon League protocol would have mandated at least a 14-day pause.
While Davis’ compliance with a situation he decried is problematic, he isn’t the only person in his position who currently represents that narrative. A coach in the women’s game deserves the same criticism.
More cognitive dissonance and deflection
Heading out west to the University of Arizona women’s program, the Wildcats’ head coach Adia Barnes likely wishes she could retract some of her recent words. In essence, she suggested that college basketball players should get priority for a COVID-19 vaccine over the elderly and people with compromised immune systems.
“College athletes should not get it first, but they should get it second or third,” Barnes said. “For sure health workers, frontline (workers) have to get it first. But I’m saying before the general public, I feel like college athletes should get it because we’re competing. If you want to have us compete and have a season and be able to play basketball and we’re not in a bubble, I think that we have to get it because of the risk. Or otherwise, you’re going to see games canceled the whole year.”
There you have it, because putting on this show is so crucial to life, sorry Grandma. If you have Lupus or already had Myocarditis, well, you should have thought about this before you developed those diseases. You see, we’re playing basketball here. Our society can’t afford to lose any of these precious games. If some people die, well, that’s just the cost of having an almost full
Again, the question begs to be asked: if Barnes doesn’t feel that the existing protocols are sufficient to keep the athlete-employees she coaches safe, then why is her team going ahead with the season? Barnes’ greater attitude toward the virus is revealed in an earlier comment of hers.
At the end of November, Barnes revealed that she had already instituted multiple partial “shutdowns.” She gave some players an option on whether to continue with organized activities in those instances. There are so many questions here: why did she initiate these half-team pauses? How did she decide which half of the team would have the option to continue? Did she involve medical personnel or make those decisions unilaterally?
In both the Arizona women’s and Detroit men’s situations, we see a trickle-down failure of leadership. Because the NCAA has refused to mandate national COVID-19 protocols, much less even feign an attempt to enforce them, no one is taking responsibility for protecting the campus workers. The exploitation stations do whatever is convenient at the moment, with preserving as much revenue as possible being the top priority.
One coach of a major conference women’s program has obviously taken advantage of that leadership vacuum. However, the framing of the situation is still a huge issue.
Why Duke’s strike is good but not great
Probably the biggest news over the weekend in college sports was the Duke women’s team’s season-ending strike. Duke framed it as an “opt-out,” which is part of the horrible framing of the situation.
The fact that the women who comprise the roster had the ability to execute this strike speaks volumes about first-year head coach Kara Lawson. While other coaches at NCAA-member institutions openly subvert workers’ agency, such as South Carolina interim head American football coach Mike Bobo, Lawson has obviously created an atmosphere where the athlete-employees have some ability to control their circumstances.
However, the question is whether this move came too late. There were already two positive tests on the team prior to the strike taking hold. Players are still within the incubation period from those positive tests, so it’s uncertain how far the virus may have spread. The fact remains that Lawson’s team should never have attempted to play this season amidst a pandemic that’s killed 1 in every 1,000 residents of the United States of America so far.
Additionally, the way the athletic department worded its statement about the strike is very telling for future implications.
This putting the onus on the workers will be the pat defense that all NCAA-member institutions who attempted to hold live competitions during a deadly pandemic will use to try to escape liability for long-term health effects suffered by those athlete-employees. In essence, the argument will be, hey, we gave you the choice not to work, and you chose to show up for your job.
That narrative conveniently ignores the tremendous power that people in Bobo’s position hold over these campus workers. Coaches can unilaterally opt to not renew grant-in-aid and stipends, which would deprive these athlete-employees of not only their livelihoods but their food and housing as well. The pressure to comply is enormous.
In this tale of three coaches, we see the moral miasma that the college sports industry continues to be. As with all other organized crime, it sells itself as vital to the social order and preventing greater atrocities. However, the crimes are real and their victims suffer actual consequences. The silence of university presidents and government officials is still deafening.