Stop if you’ve heard this before— higher-up decision-makers are hopeful that college sports will be played in the fall— and with fans in the stands.
This is the vision that departing athletic director, Fred Glass, and incoming athletic director, Scott Dolson, are hoping comes true by the time the month of August rolls around.
“We’re selling season tickets in football and basketball. We’re planning,” Dolson told Indiana football and basketball radio play-by-play broadcaster, Don Fischer, on a Facebook live chat on Friday night. “At the same time, knowing that we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, we’re hopeful that we have a normal situation.”
In the event the college football season is shortened in the fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dolson and Big Ten officials have a contingency plan in place.
“We’ve put together a ticket assurance program that if the schedule changes in any way, we’re going to automatically refund,” Dolson said. “We didn’t want anyone to worry what happens if we only play 10 games instead of 12 football games. We’ll refund the money and that was really, really important.”
The preparation for a reduced number of games during the 2020 season comes after NCAA President Mark Emmert said the regular season could end by Thanksgiving. This is nothing out of the ordinary. However, Emmert went on to say another scenario could be to complete conference championship games by Thanksgiving.
Just to note, Indiana’s final two regular season games are at Michigan (Nov. 21) and at home against Purdue (Nov. 28). The bye week for the Hoosiers this season comes in week five (Oct. 3) between matchups against Connecticut and Maryland, should Indiana get the chance to schedule an additional opponent if any games were to be cancelled at the end of the regular season.
“We’re working with people, because we want them to come to games. We hope that it’s going to be as normal as possible. We’re planning for scenarios,” Dolson said. “But what we’re doing is we want to make certain that our fans have the confidence that we’ve got the plan in place from a health and safety standpoint.”
Dolson will take over full-time as Indiana’s athletic director beginning on July 1. Glass, who has been in the position since 2009, knows it will be a difficult task for college athletics to operate as usual given the current situation with the novel coronavirus.
“We can’t take all the risk out of it. There is risk in it. But what we can do is have the absolute best doctors give us the absolute best protocols. That’s what we’re going to do,” Glass said. “Hopefully this way forward will work out and we’ll have football, probably, with a reduced crowd. And basketball, too.”
This past week, Indiana released a plan that includes what the university calls “Phase One” of bringing student-athletes back to campus.
“This is like coaching a sport that has never been invented,” Indiana football team physician, Dr. Andy Hipskind, said during a Zoom conference on Wednesday. We’re going to have to make adjustments on the fly, but we feel like we have a robust plan in place.”
In this first phase, voluntary workouts open up on campus for players of the football program on June 15, and the men’s and women’s basketball programs on June 18.
“People would be amazed [at] the detail that goes into just getting our student-athletes back to lift weights,” Dolson said.
While a plan has been created in an effort to ensure the health and safety of all Indiana student-athletes, Dolson is still working on coming up with a solution to provide the same for fans to attend athletic events in Bloomington.
“Just like we want our student-athletes to have confidence and their parents to have confidence when they come back, that we’re looking out for everything from a health and safety standpoint, it’s the same thing for our fans,” Dolson said. “We’re putting all those plans in place now. We’ll be ready.”
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