After a meeting Thursday of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Presidents Council, it was expected the NCAA Division II conference would make an announcement Friday regarding the status of fall sports.
That won’t be the case.
After a two-hour meeting Thursday, no vote was taken. Instead, a survey will go out to presidents and results will be tallied before another meeting next week, while RMAC athletic directors will meet for more discussion Tuesday. A decision is now to be made by July 24, though a vote could come sooner.
An hour after the meeting concluded Thursday, the NCAA issued new guidelines surrounding COVID-19 and fall sports. It said all athletes should be tested no more than 72 hours before competition in high-risk contact sports such as football, that everyone on a sideline will be required to wear a mask and that any athlete with a high-risk exposure to the coronavirus must be quarantined for 14 days.
“Big issue is testing capacity in various areas,” Fort Lewis College athletic director Brandon Leimbach said.
Leimbach said the Presidents Council discussed which sports would be easier to host this fall such as cross-country and golf as well as whether or not it would be possible to try to start football and other traditional fall sports such as soccer and volleyball.
Eight of 24 Division II conferences have now suspended all fall sports until the spring. Others, such as the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association, have pushed football to late September or early October for potential start dates.
The RMAC has member institutions in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Utah. At the high school level, Utah is moving forward with fall sports as usual, while New Mexico has suspended football and soccer to the spring and will start all other fall sports later in the school year than usual. Colorado has made a request to state health officials to begin fall sports as regularly scheduled Aug. 10 with health guidelines in place, though it is still waiting for approval of that request.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said she would urge college athletics in New Mexico not to play contact sports this fall. New Mexico Highlands, the lone New Mexico institution in the RMAC, was transparent during the Presidents Council meeting that it would not be able to play fall sports at this point in time, Leimbach said.
With coronavirus cases on the rise across the U.S., there is slim hope for college sports to be played as normal this fall. Some conferences, such as the Ivy League in Division I or the California Intercollegiate Athletic Association in Division II, have already suspended fall sports. Other conferences have moved to play only conference games this fall, though those conferences may also be forced to make further decisions.
The NCAA return-to-sport guidelines released Thursday are in hopes that numbers will start to decline in time for practice and competition to be held at all this fall. It also said all member schools must adhere to public health standards within their local communities.
“This document lays out the advice of health care professionals as to how to resume college sports if we can achieve an environment where COVID-19 rates are manageable,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said in a statement. “Today, sadly, the data point in the wrong direction. If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle on the pandemic.”
jlivingston@durangoherald.com
