[ad_1]
Attributable to a small cluster of latest COVID-19 circumstances that led to quarantining athletes on 5 varsity groups, Northeastern has canceled video games and practices for all winter sports activities by Dec. 18.
Jeff Konya, athletic director at Northeastern, mentioned he’s hopeful that the winter groups will resume practices in early December and launch abbreviated seasons after Dec. 18.
“If you’re making a choice of this magnitude, the primary precedence is the wellness and security of the scholar athletes,” Konya mentioned. “Analyzing the info as we all know them proper now, this choice provides us our greatest probability of conducting intercollegiate athletics in an applicable method in mid-December.”
The postponements contain girls’s and males’s groups in ice hockey, basketball, and indoor monitor and discipline, in addition to in girls’s swimming. Fall and spring sports activities needs to be largely unaffected, as these packages lately concluded their winter practices.
Konya mentioned he doesn’t anticipate the cancellations to have an effect on the NCAA event hopes of the affected groups.
“It shouldn’t influence us as a result of our pathway to these postseason tournaments goes to be depending on how we do in convention play,” Konya mentioned.
Konya mentioned that “small outbreaks” of COVID-19 circumstances had been found on Northeastern groups in girls’s basketball and hockey, and males’s and girls’s indoor monitor and discipline.
Moreover, Northeastern’s contact-tracing program resulted within the quarantining of a small variety of student-athletes of the lads’s basketball and girls’s swimming and rowing groups.
Konya famous that many of the groups at Northeastern haven’t had constructive exams for COVID-19.
Total since Aug. 17, Northeastern has carried out 431,276 COVID-19 exams of scholars, college, and employees. Solely 334 of these examined have been constructive for the coronavirus, together with 279 college students. The college’s contact tracing has decided that almost the entire circumstances are as a consequence of off-campus exercise.
The choice to postpone the winter seasons was made Monday evening by college management. Konya knowledgeable all head coaches of the choice that evening.
The boys’s basketball crew had been scheduled to journey on Wednesday to Washington D.C. to play three video games within the DC Paradise Jam event starting on Thanksgiving Day. These video games have been canceled, as have the opening video games of the lads’s hockey crew on Friday and Saturday towards the College of Massachusetts Lowell. No member of the lads’s basketball or hockey packages had examined constructive for COVID-19, Konya mentioned.
The Ivy League introduced Nov. 12 the cancellation of its winter sports activities program, main days later to the cancellation of the 2021 Beanpot males’s hockey event, which Northeastern had received for the previous three seasons. Quite a few groups throughout the U.S. have skilled cancellations or postponements all through the NCAA’s fall competitions.
In July, Northeastern determined to suspend its fall sports programs, with hope that these competitions could also be rescheduled in spring 2021—a plan that has not been dominated out, Konya mentioned. The boys’s rowing crew, which historically competes within the fall, lately was quarantined after a student-athlete examined constructive for COVID-19, Konya mentioned.
For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.
[ad_2]
Source link