Inside One Coach's Pitch to Reconstruct the Basketball Calendar

COVID-19 has changed the sports landscape and thus the college sports landscape. For now, these changes are scary. We don't know for certain if we will start the college football season on time. We don't know if changes to the academic calendars at many schools nationwide will thus shift the athletics calendars.

But would a change to the athletics calendar be all that bad?

Some coaches have been advocating for a change in the college athletics calendar since before coronavirus was even remotely a concern.

Ole Miss women's basketball coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin is one of those coaches. She wants to overhaul the basketball calendar. To her, it has much more to do with a passion for the game than it does with a novel virus that we may never see in the next few decades:

"These kids don't miss basketball. You watch the (Michael Jordan) documentary. MJ and those guys, they loved basketball. They loved it," McPhee-McCuin said. "The love of the game, do we see it? Do we really see the love of the game anymore? I don't know if we are."

Do kids now not have the same passion for the game of basketball as Jordan? Maybe. Do kids now not have the same work ethic as Jordan? Maybe. Maybe not.

But what we know for sure is kids now have been put on a completely different trajectory than they were two decades prior. AAU basketball starts at such a young age for top recruits. Oftentimes, that means weekends of five or six games in two or three days.

When you hit college, athletes are nearly on campus year round. It's hard to not get burnt out. From a younger age the stress starts, says Ole Miss sports psychologist Dr. Josie Nicholson. The brain doesn't process that childhood stress until one is 18- to 22-years-old. Any trauma or stress from before will often bubble up during the college years.

Does the college basketball calendar create a healthy environment for these kids to process that stress? McPhee-McCuin doesn't believe so.

So what is her plan?

“Do you really need 13 non-conference games?” McPhee-McCuin questioned. “After (winter) finals, we should just be able to jump right into it and start the season. Maybe we don’t have a March Madness, maybe it’s May Madness. I think you could fit a season into a semester. Even if you wanted to do all 36 games, I think you could fit a season into one semester if you start early January.”

In her world, the 30-game regular season would be cut to 24. If you make it all the way to the championship, you'd be playing 30 games instead of 36. That six "missing" games would come from the non-conference slate, taking it from 13 down to seven.

The conference slate would remain as normal except played at a later date. Instead of starting the regular season in early November, non-conference play would begin in early January, theoretically pushing everything back about six weeks. Yes, in this plan, March Madness would now be May Madness.

He plan doesn't even just involve the playing calendar. McPhee-McCuin would revamp the summers as well.

She jokes that she's almost enjoyed this coronavirus break. Not actually, but she's seen some good in it.

Just two weeks ago, following finals, she gave the Ole Miss team an option to skip their standard, weekly zoom meeting. In the group text, she sent an anonymous poll – 'do you want to meet this week or take some time off?'

It was a unanimous yes. And it surprised her.

“If they were on campus, they wouldn’t want that," McPhee-McCuin said. "We have forced ourselves to believe that they need this time (on campus). No they don’t. Why didn’t they need it before? They need to time to debrief and for their bodies to heal. They need time to miss it... We wonder why these kids are breaking down and they’re not happy anymore. College should be a fun experience and I don’t think they’re getting that if there’s no break.”

Moving forward, McPhee-McCuin is going to learn from that and give them a break. Regardless of what NCAA norms are, she says she's going to give her players the first summer session off and force them to leave campus. Maybe some will study abroad, others will go see family and others will take a trip.

Regardless of how they spend that extra off time, when they come back to campus for the second summer semester, she bets they'll be more excited to be back with their teammates playing basketball.

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