The ongoing coronavirus pandemic prompted Ivy League schools to cancel their upcoming fall sports seasons Wednesday, suggesting that other major intercollegiate bodies could follow suit.
Student-athletes who normally play football, field hockey, men’s and women’s cross country, men’s and women’s soccer and women’s volleyball will not take the field or court for their schools this autumn, the league announced.
It’s the first NCAA Division I conference to call off any sports for the 2020-21 academic year because of the pandemic.
“Ivy League institutions are implementing campuswide policies including restrictions on student and staff travel, requirements for social distancing, limits on group gatherings and regulations for visitors to campus,” the group said in a statement.
“As athletics is expected to operate consistent with campus policies, it will not be possible for Ivy League teams to participate in intercollegiate athletics competition prior to the end of the fall semester.”
Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell Universities, plus the University of Pennsylvania, were supposed to kick off their football slates with non-conference games Sept. 19 — but officials said they couldn’t risk the safety of players, coaches, staff and fans with the deadly virus still plaguing America.
“With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk,” according to a joint statement by the league’s eight presidents. Read More
