In a player-led decision, the University of Vermont women’s basketball team has opted to end its season early, after weeks of on-and-off quarantines and multiple positive cases of Covid-19 on the team.
The team’s last full practice was on Jan. 12. Shortly thereafter, positive Covid cases among the team’s Tier 1 personnel — which includes athletes, coaches and managers — shut down play temporarily, while affected players were put in quarantine. It is unclear how the team was exposed to the virus, coaches said.
UVM Athletic Director Jeff Schulman has declined to comment on an exact number of positive cases on any of UVM’s teams.
“Since the start of the season, we certainly had multiple cases within the women’s basketball program,” Schulman said. “But this wasn’t a situation where we had no players left to play and we couldn’t do it.”
The team has been competing since mid-December, with all players being tested three times a week. That testing frequency allowed the players to be exempt from Vermont’s 14-day quarantine rule for anyone traveling out of state.
Women’s basketball has had a few skill workouts over the past several weeks for players not in quarantine, but hasn’t had all 13 players in one room for several weeks, Schulman said.
But Covid exposure in UVM athletics isn’t limited to women’s basketball. Schulman said there has been a spike in cases throughout the athletic department in recent weeks.
All teams have postponed practices and games until Feb. 4.
Before that decision, only the men’s and women’s hockey teams and men’s and women’s basketball teams had been competing. The school’s fall and spring sports were scheduled to begin their seasons this month, but will now wait until February to meet in-person.
At a press conference Monday morning, women’s basketball coach Alisa Kresge said that her players have been discussing the possibility of ending the season for several weeks now, and after discussions among the players and one-on-one conversations with each player, the team collectively made the decision to end the season.
Kresge said no one aspect of the situation pushed the team to the breaking point. Instead, she said, it was just a “perfect storm” of unpredictable factors that led the players to decide they couldn’t handle moving ahead with more games.
“It was the unknowns of: Could we stay healthy? What would it mean for their future if they individually got sick? Do we have games, do we not have games? It was just the combination of the unknowns that took its toll for our players,” she said.
A number of other women’s basketball teams nationwide canceled their seasons early this season because of the coronavirus, but Kresge said other schools’ decisions didn’t come up when they were discussing their options. She said the main factor weighing on the players was not wanting to let their teammates down.
Schulman said all UVM athletes know that ending play is a decision they’re welcome to make at any point.
“We’ve been very clear with all of our student-athletes from the beginning of this that they can choose whether to participate at any point,” he said. “If they chose to step away, there was going to be no impact on their academic standing, on eligibility, on their athletic scholarship and no judgment at all from the athletic department.”
The NCAA has given all student-athletes an additional year of eligibility because of the coronavirus. Kresge said the women’s basketball team has only one senior, and she is applying to grad school in the hopes of continuing to compete on the team next year.
Most of the women on the team haven’t seen their families since July, Kresge said. It’s her hope that all her players will go home to their families, recover from the season, and then come back to campus for postseason practices down the line, when the virus’ spread has slowed.
Schulman said other UVM teams have had internal discussions similar to those of the women’s basketball team, but “I don’t know that any of them are quite as far along, obviously, as women’s basketball. But there’s no question that individual athletes are having these conversations with coaches and with teammates, and I do know that there’s been some teams that have had some collective conversations about it.”
Schulman said he has confidence in the ability of the men’s basketball team and the men’s and women’s hockey teams to finish their seasons. Between the testing and quarantine protocols, players would be able to stay safe, he said.
“We’re not going to do anything that puts the community or anybody at risk,” he said. “But as we’ve shown before, I think we have protocols in place that can allow us to play.”
Because of the schoolwide pause until Feb. 4, Schulman said, all team schedules are up in the air right now. He expects play to resume in the coming weeks.