The NCAA has released its latest guidelines for returning to sports in the fall. This, of course, addresses Ohio State and any other athletic program’s efforts towards playing college football in 2020.
It’s the third installment of recommendations and centers around daily self-health checks and testing within 72 hours of competition within the context of high contact sports like football.
In totality though, it involves all of the following:
- Daily self-health checks.
- The appropriate use of face coverings and social distancing during training, competition and outside of athletics.
- Testing strategies for all athletics activities, including pre-season, regular season and post-season.
- Testing and results within 72 hours of competition in high contact risk sports.
- Member schools must adhere to public health standards set by their local communities.
NCAA issues next set of return-to-sport guidelines: https://t.co/cE5zpWIhbd
The third installment of recommendations outlines daily self-health checks, testing within 72 hours of competition for high contact risk sports. pic.twitter.com/2V5fdpRk27
— Inside the NCAA (@InsidetheNCAA) July 16, 2020
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“Any recommendation on a pathway toward a safe return to sport will depend on the national trajectory of COVID-19 spread,” said Brian Hainline, NCAA chief medical officer. “The idea of sport resocialization is predicated on a scenario of reduced or flattened infection rates.”
In layman’s terms, that means all of this means nothing if the COVID-19 pandemic is not in a better place in terms of community spread and management than where we are today. In recent weeks, the total positive case found has begun to skyrocket in hotspots and is continuing to climb in more than half of the states.
“When we made the extremely difficult decision to cancel last spring’s championships it was because there was simply no way to conduct them safely,” said NCAA President Mark Emmert. “This document lays out the advice of health care professionals as to how to resume college sports if we can achieve an environment where COVID-19 rates are manageable. Today, sadly, the data point in the wrong direction. If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle on the pandemic.”
As always, guidelines are just that. These new models do not result in any mandates but are indeed best practices for managing the protocols and policies each institution can put in place to keep student-athletes safe.
So what does it all mean? This is a good path forward to put into practice, but we all still have to do our part to collectively mitigate the spread of this pandemic, or it’ll be hard to get college football and other sports off the ground when the autumn rolls around.
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