ASUN Cancellations Unwelcome News for All

When the ASUN announced Aug. 14 that fall competitions would not take place, Calli Doan, a junior on Liberty’s cross-country team, was prepared for the shock. Doan, like many athletes across America, lost her spring season to COVID-19, but she worked hard throughout the spring and summer to stay in shape for the fall season, as her fiancée timed her trials at home. 

As the summer progressed, however, the knowledge that she could potentially lose a second consecutive season to the pandemic loomed over her. 

“When we first started the summer, we were like, ‘Okay, fall’s going to happen.’ Slowly, nothing was changing – and then we realized, ‘This might not actually happen,’” Doan said in a video call.  

For Liberty’s entire athletics department, navigating a summer defined by that uncertainty meant a constant evaluation of options and fighting a race against time as the clock ticked toward the upcoming season. 

Now, with the fall season cancelled, the department is shifting gears to plan for a spring season combining all of Liberty’s fall and spring sports, and that evaluation process will begin all over again. 

Erin Hagen, senior associate athletics director and senior woman administrator at Liberty, works as LU’s official liaison with the ASUN. Throughout the summer, she was in constant communication with the ASUN, trying to coordinate an effective plan for the fall season given the challenges of the pandemic. 

“We had to continue going through the national data, the national trends that everybody I think was following, (and) locally within the state, the state and local university trends,” Hagen said in a video interview. “We were in a lot of conversation over the summer, and it wasn’t up until the week we made the announcement with the ASUN that we truly made the decision to cancel fall sports.”

Like many conferences, the ASUN makes decisions corporately, Hagen said. Advised by the athletics support staff of its nine member schools, the various university presidents (combined as the ASUN Conference Presidents’ Council) made the final decision to postpone the fall season after long deliberation on the potential health risks of a fall season.                  

“We all remained very optimistic that competition in some way, shape or form was going to be able to happen,” Hagen said, “and then I think as we saw more and more athletics conferences make their announcements, and we once again continued to follow the data and trends, it was apparent to us that it was better to postpone and evaluate whether it was better to do this in the spring.”

In a press release, ASUN Commissioner Ted Gumbart expressed his frustration with the circumstances.

“Obviously this is a huge disappointment,” Gumbart said. “Anyone who follows college sports understands the dynamics that brought us to this decision, but that doesn’t mean we like it. My feelings right now? COVID stinks. If you weren’t putting my words into a public release, I might put it another way.”

According to LU cross-country coach Rachel Johnson, the summer was an opportunity for her athletes to challenge themselves individually, working from their homes to improve their times. Breaking the news of the cancellation to her athletes felt like yet another disappointing step backward after a challenging summer separated from her team.

“The spring was tough because it all happened all at once – everything fell apart within a couple days,” Johnson said in a video call. “But the fall being cancelled was even more tough on me telling my athletes what was going on, just because I knew they all had high hopes for the fall. In the spring, it was like, ‘Okay, let’s just make it to the fall, keep training because we can work to be better in the fall.’ (But I was) thinking in my mind, ‘What’s it going to be like when I have to tell them we might not have a fall (season)? How am I going to be able to keep everybody motivated?’”

But for Johnson and other Liberty coaches, including field hockey coach Nikki Parsley-Blocker, those meetings also highlighted some positives: the fall would mean finally practicing as a team after months apart. Whether or not a spring season happens for her players, Parsley-Blocker is happy to be out on the field again.

“We haven’t had the ability to train for six months,” Parsley-Blocker said on a video call. “The girls love the sport, we love the sport, there’s a reason we spend our life toward these aims, coaching – because we love it. We weren’t able to do camps and clinics in the summer, which stinks. It was really weird. I (haven’t missed) organized field hockey for six months in 15 years. So, at this point, it’s easy to be super excited about what you’re doing, because it was taken away from us for so long.”  

As athletes across campus adjust to a new normal, coaches and administrators face a constant battle to keep their teams healthy – which invites some unusual changes. Hagen discussed the immense challenge of coordinating the athletics program with ever-changing COVID guidelines.

“There’s a Q&A that comes out every week from the NCAA – it started at 30 pages. It’s over 100 pages now,” Hagen said.

In a time when Johnson’s athletes have to run 6 feet apart and Parsley-Blocker’s players have to wear masks in practice, coaches and administrators alike continue to adjust to the same questions and dilemmas that the rest of society is facing.

Those questions highlight the challenges that planning for a spring season, much less a winter season, will include. On top of student-athlete health concerns, administrators like Hagen must consider the constantly changing COVID-19 statistics, the possibility of a school shutdown and the logistical battle that combining fall and spring sports together would be for Liberty’s campus. With a global pandemic on their hands, certainty is a scarce commodity, and taking challenges day by day has become a regular theme around the department.

In the meantime, athletes like Doan continue to practice, just like they did in the summer, hoping that by the time spring arrives, the COVID-19 situation will have changed. For now, they wait.

“Come the end of the fall, I hope that we’re in basketball season, I hope swimming is in the pool, and I hope schedules are solidified for our fall sports for a spring season, whatever that may look like,” Hagen said. “But we’ll continue to have these weekly calls with the conference, and that’s the direction that we’re going, to ensure that our athletes have some sort of season this year.”  

John Nekrasov is the Sports Editor. Follow him on Twitter at @john_nekrasov.