Atlantic 10 postponement of fall sports affects 9 Duquesne teams

When she was the 23-year-old women’s basketball coach at Georgia Tech, Bernie McGlade’s concerns were simple:

• Zone over man-to-man defense?

• Who will be the point guard?

• What time does the bus leave?

Today, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, Bernadette V. McGlade is entering her 13th year as Atlantic 10 commissioner. The decisions she makes seated in her office in Newport News, Va., could impact the health and well-being — perhaps even life and death — of student-athletes at 14 A-10 institutions, including Duquesne.

So, it was with grave seriousness that McGlade on Friday announced the postponement of the Atlantic 10’s fall sports, the second consecutive season wiped out by the coronavirus.

If the outbreak lessens or a vaccine is available, fall sports can be moved into the spring, she said.

The decision to postpone was made after regular discussions over several weeks with conference and school officials, including Duquesne President Kenneth G. Gormley and athletic director Dave Harper.

Duquesne student-athletes affected include those in men’s and women’s soccer, cross country and tennis, plus women’s volleyball, rowing and swimming and diving. Duquesne football, which plays in the NEC, won’t be affected.

McGlade, the sister of former Pitt women’s basketball coach Agnus Berenato, said the past four months have been “tremendously unusual.”

“We all deal in different points in time in our careers with chaos or confusion,” she said. “But when you layer over top of that the extreme reality of the health risk and individuals can get sick and they can, gosh forbid, they can die, there’s a level of anxiety that I’ve had to work to control. I think everyone works to control.”

She said the current situation “certainly adds a different level of stress and empathy and concern to how important every decision is.”

Yet, the Atlantic 10 enters this time of uncertainty with hope.

There is a built-in “look-in window” in which the fall season can begin by Oct. 4 if the covid-19 outbreak subsides.

“It’s a slim opportunity, but we felt like we should keep it on the table,” she said.

Also, men’s and women’s basketball haven’t been affected.

“We’re still 75 days away from the first official practice, more than three months away from the scheduled competition,” McGlade said. “We decided we were not going to make any decisions that were related to the winter sports and we will, like everybody else, stay abreast of everything that’s happening nationally and regionally from a medical perspective, from a covid perspective.

“As a basketball-centric league, we are going to be in the ready position.”

During the quarantine period, A-10 officials were optimistic that a fall season with schedules truncated by 25% and air travel curtailed by about 70% would allow for competition to occur.

Procuring mass covid-19 testing was only one factor in the decision to postpone, McGlade said.

“It wasn’t a data point that outweighed all the other considerations that we had to talk about from a presidential level to the campus level to the simple fact of traveling for competitive games and getting on airplanes and trains and buses,” she said. “But it was one of the factors.

“If we would have leaned more towards, `We’re definitely going to play. We’re going to see if we can play,’ we would have really started to run those financial figures on the actual costs (of testing).”

McGlade said moving fall sports to the spring — actually any time between January and June — will require cooperation among several teams on campus, especially in terms of conflicts with dates and venues.

“It’s a challenge,” she said. “But when we weighed the pros and cons of, `Do we even consider having our fall sports in the spring?’, the only other option would be to cancel them. We’ve gone through that.

“When the conference puts together the schedule, we’re going to have to do it with different boundaries of the other events that are going on — soccer on the fields where we would be having lacrosse.

“We’re all going to work together and lock arms and make it happen and get the scheduling puzzle figured out as best we can.”

The move will be made with the knowledge that the Atlantic 10 might have to be excluded from NCAA fall championships. If so, McGlade won’t look back, secure in the knowledge that her league did the right thing.

“If the NCAA postpones championships and we all end up in the spring,” she said, “we’re thrilled to death.”