AD Shane Lyons Gives a COVID-19 Update with Tony Caridi
West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons sat down with legendary play-by-play caller Tony Caridi Tuesday afternoon to give an update on the West Virginia athletic department.
The Big 12 Conference recently announced that all activities are suspended through May 31 due to the COVID-19 and Lyons gave a reasoning behind pushing the date so far back.
“I think it first came out the (March) 29th just to give us a couple weeks to look into what’s really happening in the world,” said Lyons. “What does this pandemic really mean? And none of us know and still don’t know.”
“The May 31 date came about, and we can always back off that date, but what I didn’t want to do, and I don’t think the conference wanted to do, is push a date to April 15 and then shove it to May 1 then shove it to May 15,” said Lyons. So, let’s go out through the whole spring semester and if things change quickly, which we all hope they do, then we can back off of that date. That’s not a set-in stone date. It’s a date that our presidents can meet again and back off if they need.”
Prior to discussing the thought process behind suspending activities till May 30th, Lyons explained how he bases his decisions.
“I try to make my decisions based upon a few people in the medical field,” stated Lyons. “Clay Marsh, I’ll give a shout out to him because he’s been instrumental in a lot of decisions at least from West Virginia and my communication from what’s happening in the world. And then, the NCAA and the conference standpoint, they have some medical doctors in the field. It’s a matter of looking at, what are we doing? And what does the future look like? What does this pandemic look like and lets make sound decisions off of that.”
There is no certain timeline on when things will resume as of yet and if you’re looking for a return date, you’re probably not going to find one.
"With the intelligence that we’re getting, we’re still being told that probably in the next two or three weeks is when the U.S. is going to see the big spike in the pandemic across the country,” said Lyons. “You’re seeing in New York, you hear California, you hear Georgia, so what does it look like for the rest of the U.S. and they’re telling us the spike will happen in two or three weeks and then hopefully starting in May we can slowly get back to more normal lives and then June and July, the summer months we’re back to something of normal.”
Basically, when the President of the United States, Donald Trump, says we can resume our daily lives is when we will all find out together.
Across the board plans are being putting in place for all possibilities, of course there are no details yet, nonetheless, all options are on the table, except for a theory that football was going to be pushed up in the summer. Lyons made it clear that wasn’t an option.
However, there is no pandemic handbook in the NCAA and one of the minute details is everyone working from the same page or close to it.
“What we’ve had to do the last several weeks, conference commissioners as well as the athletic directors of each conference is try to come up with a pandemic policy that we’re all following pretty closely similar. So, that we’re as a Big 12 Conference is doing some similar to the ACC, the Big 10, the PAC 12, the SEC, so we’re kind do working from the same sheet.”
These are unprecedented times and they call for unique solutions, but as of now, it feels like June is the target. Of course for things to resume we all must do our part in staying home and only venture out for the essentials.
You can watch the entire interview here.
