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By John Branch
BERKELEY, California – There’s more to school football. In a position like the University of California, Berkeley, football is just one of 30 paused sports lately.
Football attracts attention and money, so the Pac-12 Conference can decide, already this week, to relaunch its football groups after declaring in August that all sports were postponed until at least January.
This resolution will have massive ramifications: for fans, for budget managers, for the signal it sends about risk-reward calculations and priorities at us public universities. But it’s not the first time
But in athletics departments, football is only a fraction of the concern. In California, there are 850 student-athletes. Approximately 750 of them play football.
Cal is where the New York Times has camped this semester, virtually on campus, to witness the exclusive challenge of reopening an elementary athletics branch to a pandemic.
Wrestling varies by season and sport. To highlight some of these differences, we analyzed 3 sports: one in autumn (women’s volleyball), one in winter (men’s basketball) and one in spring (male and female athletics).
Cal’s women’s volleyball team had just finished a 20-10 season and hoped to take advantage of that in 2020, Sam Crosson’s time season as head coach.
“We had aspirations for the championship,” said Isabel Potter, a senior pin. “We were looking for everything. “
But as summer and pandemic approached, everything shuddered and then stopped. The promise has been kept.
As with soccer, in July it became clear that the season would be delayed. Training camp would not start in early August, as planned. No conference season removed to save more time.
The big news came on August 11: the Pac-12 announced that there would be no fall sports. Football came to the cover, but among the sports that were also postponed indefinitely were men’s and women’s football, the field through, box hockey, the men’s. water polo and volleyball.
Two of Cal’s most sensible volleyball players, convention stars Preslie Anderson and Lauren Forte, will graduate in December. With the option that their next option to play may not arrive until the fall of 2021, they plan to continue their graduate studies. taking with him his last years of eligibility: Anderson in Baylor, Forte Florida.
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