There was nothing in Chris Morris’s playbook to deal with this scenario.
The head coach of the University of Alberta Golden Bears football program saw his season get sidelined when Canada West cancelled conference competition on the upcoming fall schedule due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Besides football, that leaves soccer, rugby and field hockey out in the cold come September as all 17 member universities across B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba voted unanimously on Friday to forego all regular season, playoffs and championships.
Just last month, the U Sports conference came up with a new schedule format that would see reduced games and travel for all sports, while also emphasizing health and safety. But with the loss of the fall seasons, hockey, basketball and volleyball programs who typically span both semesters won’t start before January 2021 — if they even get to go ahead at all. CanWest said that decision will be made by Oct. 8, and will also decide the fate of first-term conference championships in golf, swimming and cross-country by July 15.
Similar cancellations were also announced Monday by Ontario University Athletics and Atlantic University Sport, two of the three other conferences making up U Sports, the national governing body that also ratified the decisions.
“While professional sports leagues continue to explore options for a return to competition, the resources they will have at their disposal to minimize the risk of infection will not be the reality for Canada West members when the transition from training to competition eventually occurs,” read the press release.
It’s a financial reality that made Monday’s decision a possibility all the way back in March, when teams were being turned back from national championships in volleyball and hockey as the global pandemic hit home.
And now, just as some businesses begin to open back up and there appeared to be some light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, the train will no longer be stopping at the 2020 station for Bears football.
“It’s disappointing, I can’t say that it’s a surprise,” Morris said. “I think when everybody found out that a lot of the students wouldn’t be back on campus in the fall and things would be done through remote learning, you’ve got to remember all of these varsity athletics are funded by student fees.
“So if students aren’t on campus then they’re not going to be paying (those) fees. The reality is there needs to be money to fly across the country to play and to equip student-athletes and to do it safely. Trainers and coaches, everything costs money. And right now, it’s not financially viable to have varsity sports.”
Morris’s understanding is football players approaching the age limit of 25 won’t be charged a year of eligibility for the missed season, but that will also lead to ramifications both up and down gridiron’s food chain.
“There’s a backlog of guys now. The guys that were supposed to go to the CFL this year probably aren’t going to get the opportunity to do it. The draft the CFL is going to have is going to be compromised. How are they going to bring in draft choices from two classes in a row into one training camp? So that’s going to complicate things,” Morris said. “From our standpoint, we’re going to have a bunch of players coming back that were going to be done and those guys are going to be scholarship athletes.
“And then we have the whole new recruiting class coming in behind them, and normally those scholarships would go to the new recruiting class. So now there’s going to be scholarship-cap implications with that. There’s going to be space-on-the-team implications for that. There’s usually space made open for guys, now 2021 is going to be a pretty full roster right from the beginning if nobody aged out or loses their eligibility.”
It’s a real dog pile of issues U Sports will have to crawl out from under in order to give programs a direction to work toward, including when they can begin training together again.
In the meantime, there is no downtime.
“I met with my staff and captains last night over Zoom and we have our team meeting tonight over Zoom,” Morris said. “And then I’ve got to meet with my recruiting class because we’ve got a whole bunch of kids who are ready to go. They were excited and they signed with us and we were the No. 1 recruiting class in the country and now what happens with all those guys?
“It’s obviously very disconcerting for the parents who were expecting to send their kids off to school in the fall. It looks like we’re still going to have that happening, but it’s just going to look different. There’s lots of steps that have to happen to see what it’s going to be. We have to keep our eye, for sure, on what all the provincial regulations are going to be around social distancing and how to do all this return to play safely.”
E-mail: gmoddejonge@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge
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