Everything Jeremy Pruitt Said on Tennessee's COVID Protocol, Shutting Down Practice

Jeremy Pruitt announced Friday afternoon that he elected to shutdown Tennessee's practice in an attempt to mitigate a potential COVID-19 outbreak. Pruitt did not give specific numbers, nor did he update when the Vols would return to the practice field, but he had plenty to say about the shutdown as he answered questions.

Pruitt opened the press conference by talking about Tennessee's first six practices, and he followed by saying, "Today, we elected not to practice. As you guys know, we continue to constantly test within our program and we have really had very good results the entire time with the exception of, like I said before, when I gave them eight days off for the Fourth of July. But this week, we had a few more positive tests, so I elected to shut practice down. We retested everybody again this morning to see where we’re at. Our No. 1 priority here is to be able to protect everybody associated with our program and that’s what we’re going to continue to do. As we get the results back, we’ll see exactly where we’re at and we’ll start practice up accordingly.”

When the question was posed on how many positives it would take to shutdown practice, Pruitt said, "We’ve not put a number on the testing. We’ve been very low to zero for the most part of the entire summer with the exception of one week. We weren’t at zero or one this week, so we want to make sure that we figure out why. Obviously, back here in July when we gave the guys off and everybody went their separate ways, the numbers were really high across the country. We came back and had more positive tests. Now we’ve got the student body back on campus and it’s something that our student-athletes are going to have to learn to live with and we’ve got to make good decisions. And again, make sure when it comes to who you’re around you understand that you have to have a mask on at all times. We want to make sure that it’s not spreading within our building because to this point, we’ve had zero spread in the tracing from within our building and that’s just one of the things we wanted to make sure of."

Pruitt later added on contact tracing, "When you start trying to go back and figure it out, the first thing is that it takes a lot of communication. You want to make sure that it’s not being transmitted within our building, first and foremost. Just going back and gathering the information and figuring out. That is something that we’ve done the last 48 hours and we will continue to do that.”

When he was asked about the turnaround time, Pruitt said, "Well, it’s been easy as far as transmission for the players we’ve had tested positive over the course the last two months. If there has been a spread, whether it is in somebody’s apartment or somebody’s dorm room, that is one of the things that we have been able to figure out. This time, we wanted to take a day or two and go back to make sure that we are very thorough with each one of our players and figure out where the initial COVID came from. If that means we can’t practice tomorrow, we won’t practice tomorrow. This was my decision through our athletic training department, Dr. (Chris) Klenck. Again, it is about protecting everybody in our program. We have 25 practices; we have a bunch of time to get them in and it’s not like we are running out of time or anything like that. We want to make sure that we are protecting or players and reassuring their safet