Atlantic 10 Commissioner Bernadette V. McGlade joined A-10 beat writers on a conference call Monday to discuss some of the issues the league is facing regarding Fall Sports. Below is a Q&A derived from that call. It has been edited for brevity and clarity. David Jablonski (Dayton Daily News), Tim Benz (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), Zac Weiss (Pittsburgh Sports Report), Mike Jensen (Philadelphia Inquirer), Mike Moran (Daily Hampshire Gazette), Bill Koch (Providence Journal) were among the participants and asked the questions below.
QUESTION: What are some of the options you’re facing with fall sports and fall championships? Is the loss of the soccer, field hockey, volleyball and cross country championships a possibility?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: Given the uncertainty of the Fall academic year due to COVID-19, we might have to revise our A-10 championship formats, or even cancel championships. That’s [cancellation] one of our least preferable options. If we can’t run our full championship format, we have considered a ‘Final Four’ A-10 championship format, where we take the top four teams and have an A-10 championship so we can still keep the student-athlete experience intact. As for the regular season competitions, there is also the possibility of us losing our fall season if campuses don’t open. This would lead to considering holding Fall sport competitive season in the spring semester of 2021. Challenges here are related to the finances and the student-athlete experience, available facilities like fields and weight rooms, if you were suddenly doubling fall and spring sport seasons/ teams competing at the same time and what does that look like?
QUESTION: You’re talking about maybe moving the fall sports seasons to winter or spring? Is that what you’re talking about?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: From a contingency standpoint, I feel like we need to keep everything on the table for discussion. If for some reason campuses, colleges, and universities didn’t have any on-campus classes for the entire fall semester, which would prevent our athletes from being back and actually participating in a competitive season, which is exactly what happened with the spring sports, then we would look at if it is even feasible to have the fall sports compete in a spring season. If it is feasible to do it simultaneously with all those other events and spring sports that would be going on too. There are a lot of moving parts to that decision.
QUESTION: Like you said, so many variables and so many moving parts, have you been involved in any discussions that get deep into travel contingencies and whether you’re looking at changing schedules for non-revenue sports?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: Yes, we have. We have looked at competing while having an optimistic outlook that we would resume our fall schedules either in a reduced fashion or the full schedule. There is this natural concern of traveling and potentially air travel. We are a flight conference, so we have a lot of flying for our Olympic sports as well as basketball. Part of the contingency planning is a potential 25 percent reduction in our conference schedules so that we could align more of a regionalized schedule. We have also kept on the drawing board a potential of doing some regional competitions if we needed to with neighboring Division I Conferences so that we could fill out schedules if we had the opportunities to play and compete in a fall schedule. We’re looking at that and again, if minimizing air flights and long distance travel is going to be factor in the safety and well-being and even the anxiety level of student-athletes, coaches, and support staff, I think that is something that all of us are going to be mindful of. The decisions we make in regards to long distance travel are not just for the immediate future, but probably throughout the whole calendar year.
QUESTION: Is there a bottom-line factor in starting a completion that you need to have students-athletes on campus?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: Well, I think at some point there is a starting line, I think that you can only condense a schedule so much. Student-athletes haven’t been on campus, they’re all training independently, and as we know, that will vary. From a safety and well-being standpoint, student-athletes are going to have not only return to campus but have the adequate time to re-acclimate to rigorous training and be prepared for a competitive schedule. From a competitive schedule standpoint, you look at a minimal number of contests right now as the NCAA outlines them, we do know that those are going to be relaxed but at some point a decision will have to be made about what will constitute a full reduced fall sports schedule. The next decision would be whether that would be offset by utilizing the dates that could have been used for a conference championship, or do you still keep a conference championship to preserve that opportunity at the end of the season for an individual athlete or team.
QUESTION: Has the A-10 established a position as a league about minimum sponsorship on the number of sports? That has been an issue lately.
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: We have. Again, we are totally supportive of the blanket waivers for number of contests, start dates, financial aid and limits. However, we are not in favor of giving a relief or reduction in the number of sports a school needs to sponsor to be a Division I member. We feel that minimal number is exactly that, it’s a minimal number and if an individual intuition, college, or university had an extreme distress situation where they couldn’t field a full schedule for a sport that was up and running, then they should resort to the waiver process. But we’re not in favor of reducing the number of sports that require you to be a minimum Division I member. There is certain level of integrity of being a Division I member. That part of the blanket waiver, to my understanding, has been removed from that blanket waiver request that is being managed right now at the NCAA level.
QUESTION: I was wondering if you are running into any sort of either political or dicey situations governmentally, whatever the case may be when it comes to private schools versus public institutions and also regionally within states. Especially in Pittsburgh, the numbers towards recovery look a heck of a lot easier to get to in Pittsburgh than they do in Philadelphia. How are you navigating those waters?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: Yes on the latter. We haven’t had a ton of discussions or differences in decision making or policies between public universities in our league and our private schools but yes, there have been differentials between the state policies and federal policies. We have been talking about them in our Athletic Directors group and our Presidents Council, making sure we manage those decisions as a league. If we have two or three states which we have members in and they are not coming back up online because they’ve been impacted on a different timeframe with this pandemic, that is going to be impactful to trying to complete what we would consider a full A-10 conference schedule. I think that is where these blanket waivers are going to be really important because we are a 14-member institution conference. Let’s say we have ten of our members whose states are all up online and colleges and universities are open, but four of our members are in states that are closed down and not open. We have to be able to accommodate and build schedules for so everyone can return healthy and keep their athletic programs intact going forward.
QUESTION: As a commissioner who is trying to navigate through all of this, how important is it just having this discussion and having a plan in place so that when state governments or schools give you the green light that you will be ready to go?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: I think it is extremely important; everyone is under a high level of stress. Intercollegiate athletics is only one department on campus. Having a plan (for intercollegiate athletics) and being able to be prepared, provides a sense of confidence, and we have been working hard at this since March 25. Everyone on my staff has been working hard at this contingency planning and I think the athletic directors and presidents really appreciate it because we are not rushing to make any decisions. We have several pathways and several contingency plans and we are trying to cover all of the bases. To try to start to do that once everything opens up, you are going to be in crisis mode immediately and that is the one thing we do not want to be in. When decisions are made for a return to normalcy/states opening up, we want to be able to say okay, we have [plans] A, B, and C still in play, but D and E are off the table because they are no longer relevant. I think having contingency plans provides a peace of mind that is valuable for the league right now.
QUESTION: For your student-athletes, especially the ones who are going to be seniors in the fall and might have their last season of playing field hockey or running cross country, whatever it may be, what is your message to them?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: My message to them is that everything does happen for a reason and I love the word resilience. They are young adults right now and this pandemic has really forced everyone of college age to mature and grow a little bit quicker. I would say that it is just so important for everyone to realize there is a great disappointment in losing your senior year. I was a student-athletes, I was a coach, I understand, I still feel the anguish of when we had to stop the championship at Barclays and had to cancel spring sports. Not to trivialize that at all, but at the end of the day, when we are looking at more than 50,000 lives that have been lost in the United States alone, it puts things in perspective quickly. I would just say to the seniors that we are going to do whatever we can do to make it up to you, but there is an opportunity to have your year of eligibility renewed and if you can take advantage of that, great, but don’t let your success up to senior year be negatively impacted if for some reason your final season is cut short.
QUESTION: You mentioned Barclays in March and that decision, how important is it to talk to other decision makers in other conferences and see what their plans are make that unified decision whenever that time does come?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: It is critically important. There are 32 commissioners at the Division I level and we have been having weekly calls as a full group then we have another weekly call with the NCAA legal counsel and championship folks in terms of decisions that are being made with the NCAA championships. Essentially the 32 commissioners in conjunction with our governing boards are the decision makers for whether our fall sports get started in terms of the when and how. The NCAA does not really come into play until the postseason, so it has been extremely valuable and we have been sharing a ton of information -- we have been sharing our contingency plans, talking about potential regional competitions for a year that would help alleviate long distance travel to be able to fill schedules. It has been extremely valuable and I would have to commend my colleagues, it has all been in a very organized fashion since March 12.
QUESTION: If everything was to take place in the fall as planned, is there a timetable you have for those luxuries you talked about like getting the student-athletes prepared.
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: As soon as we could possibly know, time is of value and right now we have time. The good news is we have time (it’s April) before our fall sports would be coming back to campus to start training. The bad news is it is April, and we still do not know if our teams are going to be able to come back on campus in late July, so it is a double-edge sword. We are still going to have our A-10 spring meetings and our business meetings (virtually). Our meetings are actually early, they are on May 12-13, so we have a couple weeks before those decisions need to be made. We also have meetings on the books every week all the way through June, weekly because we are relying on the decisions of higher education as well as our national health experts in each of our states in terms of what is going to be allowable and permissible; these laws will dictate a lot.
QUESTION: In the event that fall sports come around, what steps are in place from a medical standpoint? Are people going to have temperatures taken?
COMMISSIONER McGLADE: I think all colleges and universities and their staffs are working on health/safety contingency plans that if the fall season gets up and running on time and students get back to campus. We will take lead from the WHO as well as the CDC. Similar to the development and implementation of the concussion protocols that was adopted over the past two to three years, institutions will put in another complete set of protocols per COVID-19. Whether it is taking temperatures, or the hygiene and cleaning of the facilities, or social distancing as much as possible. Those will all be campus decisions, but we will have to layer those decisions into our conference championship sites should we be fortunate enough to host our championships in 2020-21.