Illini AD Josh Whitman: “We plan to engage in all of our fall sports”

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Albeit with detailed restrictions, the plan at the University of Illinois is for athletics to go on this coming fall.

Illinois athletics director Josh Whitman expressed this desire clearly in a public live stream presentation Thursday afternoon and laid out some details to how he and his staff envision how this plan is to be executed in the coming months.

“Our plan is to engage in all of our fall sports. Our plan is all of those sports will compete this fall. All of these decisions that have been made…with an eye toward putting us in the best position to have sports,” Whitman said Thursday. “With the understanding that if circumstances dictate, we certainly won’t hesitate to pull the car over if you will.”

Despite an ongoing negatively about college football being played this fall due to a recent spike in coronavirus cases in at least a third of the states in our nation, Illinois athletics officials rolled a presentation going one step further in the optimism - fans in the stands. Whitman detailed, using a graphic of one section’s possible seating arrangement, how social distancing and COVID-19 protocols could be executed but still maintain a 20 percent fan capacity at Memorial Stadium for home football games this fall.

"All of these decisions that have been made…with an eye toward putting us in the best position to have sports. With the understanding that if circumstances dictate, we certainly won’t hesitate to pull the car over if you will.” - Illinois athletics director Josh Whitman

Illini Now/Sports Illustrated previously detailed in late June how Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s administration releasing safety guidance for the state’s next phase of reopening called for an “outdoor seated spectator events” clause that immediately had U of I athletics officials thinking fans at football games inside Memorial Stadium is possible.

Fan capacity at Memorial Stadium in Champaign is listed at 60,670 and 20 percent of that total would supposedly allow for as many as 12,152 fans in the stands and not violate the state’s COVID-19 protocols.

“(The Illinois athletics ticket office) have put together endless models on how we might be able to seat the stadium in a socially distanced environment,” Whitman said.

According to the presentation by Whitman, football tailgating will be prohibited during the fall months.

“This is important for folks to hear. Throughout the course of the fall, there could be opportunities for relaxing of these guidelines, but we have to earn it,” Whitman said. “We have to prove to the world that we’re responsible and we can be a community that can exist in a socially distanced environment and attend these larger events and mitigate the spread of the virus. I think we should all accept that as a challenge.”

In May, Illinois athletics announced a plan to have their facilities set to reopen for student-athletes for the current voluntary summer workouts being conducted this month. The release confirming the plans for the reopening of athletics facilities said U of I athletics officials were consulting with the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, Carle physicians, the McKinley Health Center, SHIELD (the university’s committee tasked with developing coronavirus testing protocols for the U of I campus) and the Big Ten Conference.

On Tuesday after obtaining a copy of the documentation, Sports Illustrated published the details of uniform requirements agreed to by all the Power 5 conferences this fall in regards to virus testing protocols and response procedures. Illinois will need to conform to these guidelines if they’re not already doing so now.

Having uniformed testing protocols and procedures on future scheduling in case of needed postponements is the official reason why the Big Ten Conference announced on July 9 that its 14 member schools will only play games within its own league for all of the 2020 fall sports.

“One of the concerns around COVID is its effect on the cardiovascular system, and so knowing if someone's been exposed or possibly had COVID in the past was important for us to understand and that's why we chose to include antibody testing," Illinois associate athletic director of sports medicine Randy Ballard said Thursday. "Not all of our fellow Big Ten institutions are doing that, but we felt in terms of really just doing the best job we can to protect the health and well being of our student-athletes, it was important information to know. And so as part of that initial test, quarantine test and antibody test process, we identify one if we have any active cases. And if so, we address them, they're isolated immediately.”

Hey, Illini. Here's what you can expect in your back-to-campus PPE kit.

✌🏽 Illinois-branded face coverings
🧼 Hand sanitizer & wipes
🔑 Digital thermometer & a clean key

This fall, make sure you do your part so we can stay together. #IveGotYouCovered pic.twitter.com/TXz8nsDIkE
— University of Illinois (@UofIllinois) July 16, 2020

Without a schedule being released yet by the Big Ten Conference office for any of the fall sports, Whitman was unable to provide answers on the issues of travel or the status of the Illini Marching Band.

“It’s unusual, to say the least, to know that we are sitting here on July 16 and we don’t have a football schedule yet, we don’t have a volleyball schedule yet or a soccer schedule yet,” Whitman said. “We ask for you to continue to be patient with us. We have groups who are working very diligently on all of those things.”