PLL to Hold Two-Week Summer Tournament Without Fans in Place of Second Season

When Premier Lacrosse League co-founder and Atlas Lacrosse Club star Paul Rabil boarded his Delta flight from New York City back to Los Angeles on Friday, March 13, he was becoming increasingly aware of the period of uncertainty that the sports world was entering. Less than two days earlier, the NBA had suspended its season. One day before his flight, MLB and the NHL followed suit. Both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments had also been canceled. When Rabil entered the plane that would take him back across the country, flight attendants were handing out disinfectant wipes to clean passenger seats. This is starting to get really intense, really fast, he thought to himself.

Rabil told his brother Mike, a fellow PLL co-founder, that he was going to spend the entire trip starting to figure out how the league would proceed amid the global coronavirus pandemic. He fired up the Delta WiFi, started a Google document entitled “PLL COVID-19 Scenario Planning” and began mapping out the league’s future. Rabil devised a league task force, denoting responsibilities, including everything from events to strategy to tickets to finance, to name just a few. He crafted 12 different scenarios for how the league would proceed. The eventual PLL Championship Series was one of them.

Now entering its second year, the PLL will hold a two-week quarantined tournament without fans this summer, replacing its previously scheduled season, which was initially set to begin later this month. Throughout the first week of the PLL Championship Series, each of the league’s seven teams will participate in a 14-game group play format to determine seeding for the following week’s single-elimination tournament. A league champion will then be crowned. The event will run between July 25 through Aug. 9, filling the 2020 Olympic window as it will be broadcasted across NBC, NBCSN and NBC Sports Gold in addition to being streamed online.

Rabil says that in announcing the league’s plans publicly, the PLL becomes the first North American team sports league to develop and publicize a plan for how it will proceed with live sports this summer. The event also provides the organization with an opportunity for continued growth.

“The concentration of professional lacrosse on television will be unlike anything anyone has ever seen,” Rabil tells Sports Illustrated.

The PLL was recently provided access to the White House’s sports committee and task force that corresponds directly with the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization, Rabil says. The league has additionally formed an internal COVID-19 medical committee to help inform their decisions. Health and safety, Rabil explains, is the PLL’s top priority as it proceeds with the tournament.

Per the PLL co-founder, communications from the White House through the CDC and WHO have revealed that the United States’s national testing environment will look different this summer than it does today, leading to the league’s medical protocols. While the league’s safety procedures are still being codified, at a high-level, Rabil explains that it will include a testing and home-incubation period prior to each participant’s arrival, in addition to further testing throughout the three-week on-site period. (Players will take part in a one-week mini-camp prior to the official start of the tournament.) “It will be very stringent,” Rabil says of the league’s emphasis on maintaining a safe, medical environment.

Those within the PLL estimate that fewer than 300 people will be quarantined at the tournament’s eventual site, which is still being discussed. Per Rabil, the tournament is likely to occur in either the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast or Midwest regions of the country. The league also plans on restricting all travel in and out of the eventual locale.

While the PLL has been in communication with a number of other sports leagues, from the NBA to the PGA Tour to NASCAR, the lacrosse league’s size proved to be advantageous in its pivot to the two-week tournament. The “muscle memory,” as Rabil puts it, of launching a new league just two years ago was also helpful in fully adjusting its 2020 season this past April.

“We were up for the challenge,” Rabil says. “We can make decisions far more swiftly in an environment that is optimized and where timing is critical.”

Rabil says that the PLL prides itself on its adaptability, adding that one of its league values is “preserving through the noise,” in essence showing “resilience, proactively, ingenuity and grit.”

Its creativity will also be on display throughout the event itself as the league looks to expand on its on-field successes during Year 1, which included mic’ing up its players, interviewing players on-field and getting instant player reactions. With NBC, the league plans on rethinking its broadcast, examining where the game camera will be located, where slasher cameras are, considering additional handheld cameras and what to do with audio, among other adaptations. “We don’t want to feel like our broadcasters are in a quiet booth,” Rabil says.

Each of the seven teams will sport a 22-player roster, with coaches likely forced to devise new strategies considering the format. While Rabil says that the league will return to its normal format in 2021, the league’s co-founder adds that its players have been briefed multiple times and are excited about this year’s format.

“This is the strongest pound-for-punch professional lacrosse has ever seen,” Rabil says. “…You’re going to get the best product in our sport during this time. I’m fully confident in that.”