PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan)- Carnegie Mellon University announced Wednesday that it will not participate in fall sports because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its recent spike. That means football, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis and women's volleyball will not have a fall season.
This announcement went hand-in-hand with the Ivy League publicizing Wednesday that the entire conference has shut down fall sports in 2020. So what went into this decision?
"Since spring championships were canceled in March and we had to suspend our seasons, we have been actively working on figuring out a safe return to play. We established a return to play task force that's been meeting regularly with university administrators, my leadership team within our department, team physicians from UPMC and going through every phase of a return.
So, the NCAA has had a re-socialization protocol, UPMC has had protocol and we would go through it every step of the way to figure out how our operation could work with 18-22 year old's and how we could get a safe return to play for our student athletes.
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I wouldn't say that there was one moment, I think there's a whole number of factors that go into it. But, if I'm going to look at our student athletes and I'm going to look at their parents when they drop off their young men and young women on-campus and say, 'We're going to do absolutely everything we can to keep your sons and daughters safe and healthy,' it just doesn't comport for Carnegie Mellon."
Centor also commented on whether any of the fall sports seasons could potentially move to the spring instead.
"You know, I don't know about the spring. I can only speak for Carnegie Mellon and know that the fall was not right for us. If the spring were right and there would be an opportunity to play, then we'd be interested in pursuing that."