FAYETTEVILLE -- The grand reopening of weight rooms and training rooms across the SEC and in other areas of the country takes place today as an early monumental step toward the return of college sports competition this fall.
At the University of Arkansas, athletes in football, men's and women's basketball, soccer, volleyball and men's and women's cross country have been trickling back to town for a couple of weeks in advance of the re-opening.
College athletic facilities across the country have been shuttered to team activities since March 13 in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus, the pandemic that has been gripping the globe for nearly three months.
"We'll continue our Zoom meetings with them, but it's sure going to feel more like a football team and things of that nature getting them back here on campus," first-year Arkansas Coach Sam Pittman said on a video conference last week. "I'm excited to get them back."
The Razorbacks are following the guidelines of health officials who have been advising the SEC in following a policy of conducting daily health screenings and doing coronavirus testing only for athletes who are showing symptoms. Some SEC schools and others have announced testing each athlete who returns to campus.
The UA announced last week that it had one athlete test positive for the virus, and sources with knowledge of the incident say that person is a football player.
UA Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek said the athlete is doing well in quarantine. Any UA employee or athlete who tests positive must isolate for up to 14 days.
After the NCAA elected on May 22 not to extend its ban on on-campus activities, which expired May 31, the SEC became the first conference to signal it would reopen its campuses to athletes. Various other conferences have followed suit and many other Power 5 programs also will reopen some of their facilities today.
For Arkansas football, voluntary weight training, agility work and conditioning in small groups will come first, with only strength and conditioning coaches allowed to instruct and monitor.
Pittman said the strength staff, led by Jamil Walker and Ed Ellis, will determine baseline levels for the players and build back slowly. However, Pittman added, he and the coaching staff have voiced their trust in the players' following suggested workout regimens during the crisis.
"I trust our kids, and I trust that they're doing what we ask them to do," Pittman said. "Obviously, we've had constant contact with our guys. There's reasons behind that. One of them is obviously to see what they're doing, how they're doing with the list [of objectives during the pandemic], but we chose to trust, and our big deal is, 'Why can't you come back in as good a shape as if you were here?' And the bottom line is we trust that our kids will be in outstanding shape when they get back."
The Arkansas athletic department drew up a 30-page plan for the return which includes sanitizing guidelines and procedures, the mandatory wearing of masks for athletes who are entering and exiting the facilities and for strength and conditioning and other team officials who conduct or monitor training.
The guidelines include distancing in all workout and training facilities, limited groups of participants and staff, athlete-initiated cleaning of equipment during workouts, no UA-provided water or energy drinks, and one-way access into and out of facilities, such as the Smith Center for football players.
"It's strength and conditioning, so the weight room will be able to handle those, and those will be some agilities and those will be long stride depending on what day we elect to do those," Pittman said. "As far as ball drills and individual drills and all that, that strictly has to be up to the individual player on how they participate in those drills, and those would be on their own, non coach-supervised at some facility."
Only limited facilities are opening today, including the weight rooms and training rooms at the Smith Center, the Bev Lewis Center and the Basketball Performance Center, as well as the Walker outdoor fields for conditioning only. Team locker rooms, practice and competition areas, student-athlete lounges, hydrotherapy areas and equipment rooms will remained closed until the next two stages of the phased reopening at Arkansas.
The Razorbacks' Week 2 opponent, Notre Dame, has made some prominent moves during the coronavirus lull. The Fighting Irish's season opener against Navy, scheduled for Aug. 29, will not be held in Dublin, Ireland, as originally scheduled, but will be played in Annapolis, Md.
Notre Dame will have an open date Sept. 5, when the Razorbacks are scheduled to host Nevada for their season opener, prior to the Arkansas at Notre Dame game Sept. 12.
However, the Irish will start a little behind the Razorbacks in terms of supervised training. Notre Dame officials announced last Thursday that players could begin returning to campus today with voluntary workouts scheduled to start on June 22.
"I think the realistic goal here is a minimum of four weeks of conditioning before you put them in a camp," Notre Dame Coach Brian Kelly said on ESPN last week. "College football is going to be affected if we're not playing in 90 days in terms of the conditioning element and getting these young men ready."
Pittman said last week that coaching is "my whole life, I mean that's who I am," in stating how excited he is for the phased re-openings to start.
"We love our team," he said. "We love the guys on our team. We want them back and we can't wait for that to happen, and we're adamant about it. That's our whole life and we need these kids back and hopefully they need us, but we are certainly excited to get them back."
Conferences around the country are currently discussing with the NCAA ways to have training at some point this summer for football teams who lost their spring training dates due to the coronavirus.
Pittman said he hoped by mid July teams could begin conducting organized training activities, like NFL clubs do in spring and summer, to funnel into training camps in August.