David Cutcliffe on What to Expect When Duke Returns to Campus

Football team is one of the last in Power Five to return

Duke will be one of the last teams in Power Five to return to campus when players begin arriving on Sunday.

Coach David Cutcliffe explained what the process will be like.

“There’s a protocol to everything we’re going to do,” he said. “Actually, the players, if someone brings them, like our newcomers, they’re generally going to have parents with them when they go over to the stadium, where we’re doing testing. We won’t be around nothing, just the medical people. Their parents will not get out of the car. The player only will go down. They do the symptom monitoring. They do the test. The player goes back and goes to their dorm room. Their parents help them put things in and say goodbye and they are quarantined. Those will be the most unusual startups for newcomers you’ve ever seen. We won’t see them. Sunday night, we’ll have a team meeting via Zoom. We won’t seem them until we see results of tests, whenever that occurs.”

Once a player passes the test, there are still more hurdles between them and returning to the field.

“Because our guys haven’t been here, the next protocol will be our medical community doing physicals and assessments. We’re going to evaluate the conditioning level of players. We don’t just go out there and start cold, not really understanding where we are. We’re going to do as much warm weather work as we can. People don’t think about that. They focus on the positive and negative tests, but none of us have been outside as much as we would be, so were going to do a heat acclimation along with an assessment of soft tissues and muscles.”