Some of our spring sports are still playing baseball,
softball are going on, all cross the country,
not just at the University of Arizona.
But how did the pandemic change UA sports all of this year?
- Well, in a lot of ways, it was a lot of stop and go.
In some cases you had to be prepared to travel
and you didn't quite know if you were gonna be in a bubble
or if you're gonna be driving there or flying there,
commercially or private.
So a lot of on edge kind of preparation.
And that's tough when you're mentally and physically
trying to gear up for competition,
to not know whether it's gonna be 100% go.
On the other side, because there was so much patchwork
with different health departments, restricting things
or allowing things.
And also the fact that some competitors
didn't have the same level of testing as a Pac-12 mandated.
So there was a lot of Swiss cheese going on in terms of
mixed results.
And that's tough mentally and physically
- Did the NCAA, which of course oversees
all of college sports,
did they make any allowances for student athletes
in this past year that they hadn't in previous years
because of the pandemic?
Maybe changing eligibility requirements
and things like that?
- Absolutely.
So the big change from the NCAA
was allowing student athletes to apply for waivers
or a full-time enrollment and progress towards degree.
And those are two important benchmarks
that every student athlete needs to meet every semester
in order to maintain eligibility.
But the NCAA understood that,
different student athletes
were faced with different challenges either at home
or at the university.
And so they gave us some leeway there,
which allowed student athletes
who maybe couldn't finish a semester,
or couldn't finish a class, to apply for that waiver
and still maintain the eligibility.
But, with that, provide a plan for completion.
How are you going to make those units up in the future?
It wasn't just a free pass,
it was thinking about how you're gonna make it up
after the fact.
- All right, I guess we need to ask you
to get your ball out.
The semester has ended for the University of Arizona,
ending all over the country for colleges and universities.
What's athletics look like
in the next academic year come August?
- Yeah, and it's very interesting because
we are now planning to have a somewhat normal academic year
starting in August.
But we're still gonna feel the effects of COVID,
the ripple effects are gonna be persistent.
And the most important one probably
is the size of the roster for specific teams.
Because, I'll give you an example of Major League Baseball,
last year only had a limited draft.
As a result, players didn't put themselves out to be drafted
as high numbers as in the past.
Therefore you have this sort of bottleneck that's created
on the roster.
And so for somebody coming in into college athletics,
maybe as a freshmen, there probably isn't
as much opportunity to play because the roster is top heavy.
You have seniors
and you have what we call COVID seniors now.
And so, it's tougher for coaches now
to manage their scholarship money,
it's tougher for incoming students to try to figure out
what their role on the team is gonna be.
So I think you're gonna see some of that
for probably the next three or four years
as the ripple effects continue to be evident.
- You mentioned those high school athletes
hoping to come and play at the University of Arizona
or somewhere else.
Are there going to be fewer scholarships
because there are fewer roster spots for them?
- Well, the number of scholarships stays the same,
it's just more people competing for them.
And the differences in some cases you have headcount sports
and other cases you have equivalency sports.
So those headcount sports are ones where you...
If you have a scholarship, it's 100% or nothing.
And so those are competitive in a different way,
you either have a scholarship or you don't.
It's those equivalency sports
were it starts to get more interesting
because you could split a scholarship
into smaller pieces, smaller slices.
And so maybe there is more room to distribute,
but there are more mouths to feed so to speak.
More people that are available to be on the roster,
but you have the same amount of scholarships.
So it's probably just a...
Coaches are gonna be getting very good at fractions
and percentages.
And you have to get really creative,
maybe get some significant digits
on the right side of the decimal.