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The Ivy League will not participate in any winter sports for the 2020-21 season, including college basketball, league sources have told CBS Sports. The league then formalized the decision on Thursday, announcing the cancellation of all winter sports.
“In keeping with its commitment to protect the health and well-being of student-athletes, the campus community and the general public, the Ivy League Council of Presidents has decided that league schools will not hold intercollegiate athletics competition in winter sports during the 21st season, ”the Ivy League said in a statement.
The league is the first Division I conference at nix winter sports, repeating a precedent it set earlier this year when the Ivy League was the first to cancel all of its fall sports and the first to cancel his basketball conference tournament in March.
The coaches were briefed on the decision by sports department officials via video conference on Thursday evening, sources said, with subsequent team meetings scheduled afterwards to brief the players.
Ivy League presidents have made their decision in the past 72 hours, a source said, and spent Wednesday and Thursday preparing how to explain their decision to the hundreds of student-athletes and dozens of coaches whose seasons have now been eliminated. The Ivy League decision comes 13 days before the planned start of the 2020-21 college basketball season, although the Ivy League decided last summer not to allow any of its scholarship sports to play before. the end of the winter semester.
This is not a shocking vote – far from it. Several Ivy League sources, dating back to early September, expressed pessimism that league presidents would allow winter sports / a basketball season. Some programs have not even organized indoor exercises at this point. Added source: “We don’t need the money to play. In the Ivy League, it’s 100% a health and safety issue.”
Coaches across the league have been preparing for this for weeks, though some have recently wondered if the decision could have waited until after Thanksgiving.
The news lands as coronavirus cases continue to rise rapidly in nearly every state. The United States has set records almost every day over the past week for the highest number of one-day cases. On Wednesday, the COVID tracking project showed more than 144,000 new cases of COVID-19, which broke the U.S. record of more than 136,000 cases on Tuesday. Wednesday’s update reported 65,368 hospitalizations due to COVID-19, which is also a record in the United States.
The eight institutions of the Ivy League are: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale. It was Yale who had to be the best of the field this season; the Bulldogs were ranked 99th in CBS Sports’ pre-season screening of the 357 Division I men’s basketball teams. Bethune-Cookman previously announced he will not be competing in the 2020-21 college basketball season, which actually nine Division I teams retiring from the season.
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