Here's How Power 5 Conferences Plan to Handle COVID-19 Testing for Fall Sports
The Power 5 conferences across college athletics are moving closer to finalizing uniform testing standards for COVID-19 this fall, according to a draft plan obtained by Sports Illustrated's Ross Dellenger last week.
College football players who test positive for the Coronavirus will be required to miss 10 days of competition at minimum, but up to 14 days if the athlete came into contact with another player who tested positive.
The athletes subject to the 10-day quarantine must isolate until they've gone the full 10 days since the test and have had at least three full days without symptoms.
For the athletes who came into high-risk contact and are subject to the 14-day quarantine, the quarantine is mandatory. Even if those quarantined test negative for COVID-19 during the 14-day timeframe, they must still complete the full 14 days without competition.
Standard procedure will include college teams testing football players for COVID-19 within 72 hours of games. This will be the case not only for football, but for other high-risk sports including basketball, rowing, soccer, wrestling, volleyball, field hockey, ice hockey, lacrosse, rugby, squash, and water polo.
The draft document obtained by Sports Illustrated also detailed several conditions that would result in discontinuing competition. These included: 1) lack of ability to isolate new positive cases or quarantine high-contact risk cases on campus; 2) inability to perform weekly testing; 3) campus-wide or local community test rates that are considered unsafe by local public health officials; 4) inability to perform adequate contact tracing; 5) local public health officials state that there is an inability for the hospital infrastructure to accommodate a surge in COVID-related hospitalizations.
This draft plan by the Power 5 has yet to be finalized, but is a significant step forward for college athletics in regard to the plan to return to play this fall. To date, the NCAA has removed itself almost entirely from the decision making, leaving the options to play (or not play) up to the individual conferences.
After the Big Ten became the first conference to announce that non-conference games would be canceled for the fall across all sports, many wondered if other conferences would follow suit and whether the conferences were acting in concert with one another.
Now, nearly a full two weeks since the Big Ten's scheduling announcement, we have yet to hear of another Power 5 conference canceling non-conference games - proof that conference leaders were not acting in unison during this pandemic.
Once finalized, these testing protocols will represent a strong step forward for plans to play sports this fall.
However, with all the uncertainty tied to this unprecedented pandemic, all bets are off regarding how well the plan, and sports as a whole, will work this fall.
