OT- Ivy League will not have a spring sports season
https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/30924371/ivy-league-league-play-due-covid
From the article:
"The Ivy League will not have a conference spring sports season, meaning it won't hold competitions or host league championships because of "rigorous limitations" that continue on its campuses during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the conference announced on Thursday."
February 19th, 2021 at 10:19 AM ^
With cases declining rapidly across the country, other sports and leagues (NFL/NCAAB) seemingly doing just fine mitigating cases & outbreaks, this is a bit puzzling to me.
The article didn't reference any data behind it but I'd be interested to know what data points were used to make this decision.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:07 AM ^
Covid-19 has a special protective shell that makes it immune to data.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:37 AM ^
It's really not puzzling at all when considering who the people are who are making these decisions.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:40 AM ^
Microcosm.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:47 AM ^
microcosm or echo-chamber?
February 19th, 2021 at 11:39 AM ^
It's the data being used for campus as a whole. The Ivy league views interscholastic athletics as not compatible with covid restrictions they have put on their student bodies as a whole. This is also true for pretty much every other college and university in the country. It's just that most have made exceptions for their athletes. The Ivy league won't do that. They view athletes as students first and view everything through that lens.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:44 AM ^
They view athletics as having little or even negative value.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:48 AM ^
I'm lost... are we talking about the Ivies or Schlissel?
February 19th, 2021 at 12:04 PM ^
No, they view them as having a value that is different than your own.
February 19th, 2021 at 3:42 PM ^
True. You can’t paint everyone with the same broad brush but there is certainly a relative paradigm.
February 19th, 2021 at 9:24 PM ^
Tell it to Mike Smith.
February 19th, 2021 at 10:10 PM ^
User-name checks out. Must have been the grades you earned in life.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:01 PM ^
I think it's even simpler than that.
It's about $$$$$. Major ADs make money on sports. Ivies don't, so they won't jump thru the additional hoops of testing 4-500 athletes and staff, put them at risk that other staff and students wouldn't be asked to go thru. Smaller ADs use sports to increase their brand recognition, Ivies don't need that.
February 19th, 2021 at 3:22 PM ^
My son's college is having spring sports. It's a small school and all students follow the same protocols. His team has designated times for workouts to keep the numbers in the gyms small. Everyone wears masks at all times. There will be no overnight trips and the whole team will not travel for each game, which is different from last year (or the year before since there was no season last year). They will only play conference teams. So far, the campus has been successful in containing the virus -- same with last semester. No parents or spectators at games. So while it's certainly not ideal or a regular season, they are playing. And the athletes are not held to a different set of protocols than the other students.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:26 PM ^
Very few decisions across the country regarding Covid have been made using data, exacerbated by the fact that for the first half of the pandemic, there was very little actual data available.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:35 PM ^
What are you talking about? All science pointed to indoor dining being fine on January 21st, being one day after the inauguration was purely coincidental and should be completely disregarded.
February 19th, 2021 at 4:26 PM ^
the big ten cancelled football season, too....
February 19th, 2021 at 10:26 AM ^
This is probably just the next step in the Ivy League disbanding sports altogether.
February 19th, 2021 at 10:37 AM ^
Disbanding sports seems highly unlikely to me.
I would imagine, though, that there are a lot of people in leadership positions at Ivy schools who would prefer to compete at the Division III level. They are a non-scholarship conference, so why not compete against other non-scholarship schools?
February 19th, 2021 at 10:59 AM ^
The only thing I would add to your comment is that highly unlikely is an understatement. ?
February 19th, 2021 at 11:38 AM ^
Sports matter more to Ivy schools than you'd think - they lower their admissions a lot to admit athletes, and find ways to help them out financially without calling them athletic scholarships. They enjoy having a shot at March Madness and D-I hockey. They might be able to sacrifice one school year of athletics but they wouldn't do it permanently.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:53 AM ^
they lower their admissions a lot to admit athletes,
They don't lower the requirements.
For example: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/5/28/athlete-advantage-commencement-2019/
What they do indeed to is give a student-athlete preferential treatment vis-a-vis another applicant with the *same* qualifications.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:01 PM ^
That might be the case for Harvard specifically (though I'm not entirely convinced) - but I'm quite certain other Ivies go further than this.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:09 PM ^
Considering the guy I knew who left the Air Force Academy to continue his football career and ended up at Cornell, I'm going with either lowered or bypassed admissions requirements.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:27 PM ^
Two guys from my high school went to Ivies (Columbia and Dartmouth) to play sports. They weren't idiots, but were not what you'd think of as Ivy material (or U-M material for that matter) in the classroom.
February 19th, 2021 at 9:36 PM ^
“They enjoy having a shot at ... D-I hockey.”
Gross understatement. Ivies have made the Frozen Four a dozen times in modern Frozen 4 history and have won the Championship twice in recent memory — same number of times as Michigan.
February 19th, 2021 at 9:14 PM ^
NCAA Divisions are not determined by level of competition. They are determined by size of the athletic program and specifically the number of men’s and women’s varsity level sports offered. Harvard has the largest athletic program in Division I with 42 varsity sports offered. No one at Harvard wants to go to Division III, nor could they given the size of the program.
February 22nd, 2021 at 9:54 AM ^
Well, that's not exactly true. A school with 42 sports can compete at any level they want. There is nothing at all in the rules preventing them from being D-III--divisions have minima, but not maxima.
I am saying you are wrong that "no one" wants to go D-III. Just not--yet--the people in charge of making the decision, but I guarantee that there are people there (just like there are people at every school) who dislike "big-time" college sports and want to dissociate from them. Do you not think the President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, would prefer that his school move to D-III? If not, you aren't listening to things he says about major college sports.
February 19th, 2021 at 10:34 AM ^
Mike Smith chose wisely. The Ivies have let fear run their ship for too long.
February 19th, 2021 at 10:41 AM ^
Don't forget Matty Beniers. He chose wisely too.
February 19th, 2021 at 10:39 AM ^
I feel terrible for college students across the nation.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:47 AM ^
It's definitely been a lousy year for college students. They've all lost a year of experiences not to be gotten back. I was in State College, PA on a Wednesday back in mid-October. The town itself felt somewhat normal, but walking the campus itself had a borderline-apocalyptic feel.
Last week, Cal-Berkeley banned on-campus resident students from exercising outdoors. They lifted that ban within a couple days, given an absolute uproar. But it has truly become insane at some schools.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:16 PM ^
Agreed on the outdoor exercising. On a breezy day you could be inches from someone and still at very low risk. I guess fluid dynamics is a difficult-to-grasp subject for many people.
At the other extreme are seniors in frail health having long, leisurely meals in tight spaces with poor air circulation.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:30 PM ^
The amazing thing is that it was Cal-Berkeley! People there aren't unintelligent - yet that was what they decided. Much much more hysteria-driven than science- or empathy-driven.
We'll be studying this pandemic on a retrospective basis for decades. The epi studies, of course --- but all the various sociological responses will be fascinating to do post-mortems on.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:01 PM ^
And High School Students. We are trampling pinnacle milestones in their lives which they can’t get back.
February 19th, 2021 at 12:19 PM ^
While I certainly feel bad for what they've missed, in the grand scheme of things, those "pinnacle milestones" are only major in the minds of high schoolers, and apparently their parents. Many have lost moments far more important than a first round high school playoff loss, prom, or graduation. People have lost the chance to say goodbye to loved ones who have died alone in hospitals, missed funerals, missed early days with grandchildren, cancelled weddings, lost businesses, etc.
Again, I feel bad for high schoolers and college kids, but I wish their parents would give them a little more perspective on the truly important things in life rather than make a big show about how everything they are missing should still be happening in the middle of a pandemic because "think of the children."
February 19th, 2021 at 3:11 PM ^
It's possible to have genuine empathy for all the groups you mentioned. There's no one on planet Earth who hasn't made significant sacrifices during covid.
February 19th, 2021 at 3:35 PM ^
When Covid 1st hit we had very little understanding of how it would impact people. It was scary times.
Covid is not going away. We will have strains of this probably forever.
It seems pretty clear we are doing more harm to our youth by shutting them down and disrupting their lives than we are protecting them. We should give them their lives back and those at risk should take precautions.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:14 AM ^
It is difficult to justify having a "normal" athletic semester when non-athlete students have an extremely altered academic semester. I think at some Ivys, some class years are not even permitted on campus. If there is a league that emphasizes the student over the athlete, it would be the Ivy League. While there may be little risk in having a spring season, the optics are bad when the acadmic mission is operating at such a reduced level.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:15 AM ^
johns hopkins article in the WSJ has very encouraging news, covid cases have dropped 77% in the last 6 weeks despite it being flu season, and cites a number of statistics and observations to back it up. link to article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731
between herd immunity for those who have had it and vaccinations (150 million people by end of march) increasing rapidly, the end of major life changes for most should hopefully be near.
February 19th, 2021 at 1:23 PM ^
While I agree that things are moving in the right direction and are likely to continue to do so, 150 million vaccinated by the end of March seems incredibly optimistic. Who is projecting that?
February 19th, 2021 at 4:46 PM ^
Sounded like he was summing the two to me. And if you do the math on deaths (489,067)/expected mortality rate of between .005 (April 20) and .003 (Nov 20), you get between 98 million and 160 million having had the Covid already.
Taking the pessimistic number there means only 50 million vaccinated by the end if March.
I'm sure there is a lot of duplication between those who have had it and have had the shots, but we've been vaccinating 1 million a day for a couple months now.
I don't think we all should go to concerts and football games quite yet, but this is well past the point of danger for our current modified behavior.
February 19th, 2021 at 4:54 PM ^
and at least as it relates to opening/closing schools, there was this, too:
Three weeks ago, top CDC scientists published a detailed review of the latest science on COVID and schools from the U.S. and around the world in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and concluded, ‘there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.’”
“Yet, in a sudden about-face, the same CDC is now making re-opening dependent on the number of cases in the community,” Dr. Makary wrote.
Most importantly, Dr. Makary said, the new guidelines from the CDC skipped over data showing psychological harm that school closures have had on children through the pandemic. He pointed to a study by Dr. Helen Jenkins of Boston University that showed kids were 10 times more likely to die from suicide than from COVID-19 infection. Schools in Clarke County, Nevada reopened after 18 kids killed themselves.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:18 AM ^
This isn’t terribly surprising to me. Case counts are still far above where they were in August when the Ivies cancelled the fall. On top of that, new variants that data shows to be be both more transmissible and with worse outcomes are now spreading throughout the country, meaning a spring wave is not unlikely.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:25 AM ^
They do add:
"We will continue to monitor the situation as we move forward so that our universities can determine whether Ivy League principles and evolving health conditions might allow for limited, local competition later this spring."
I'm curious what "limited, local competition" would entail.
February 19th, 2021 at 11:34 AM ^
pond hockey
February 19th, 2021 at 1:50 PM ^
I truly miss those days of shoveling the neighbor's farm pond, cutting a hole in the corner every Friday after school, being part of our 'bucket brigade' to flood the pond surface, and then playing pond hockey all weekend.
Good times!
February 19th, 2021 at 2:24 PM ^
i'm old enough to have played league games in outdoor rinks when i was really young, but all along my earlier life, including when i was still at U of M and on breaks, i skated on innumerable bodies of water - lakes, ponds, rivers, and some pretty nice outdoor rinks. there is a very cool one up where we live but we've been so busy with hoops that we haven't been since last year. such a great slice of life but not many kids get that kind of activity any more i'd guess.
February 19th, 2021 at 4:54 PM ^
I grew up a few blocks off Spring Lake and this was the hockey I played as a kid. I don't think I've seen anyone doing the same there over the last 20-30 years.
No skates of course; flattest boots you could find and a good broom.