We're a week into the 2020-21 college basketball season, and the 11-time national champion UConn women have been strangely absent from fans' TV screens. That's how it'll stay until at least mid-December.
Five days prior to what would have been the Huskies' season opener, a member of the program (not a player or coach) tested positive for COVID-19, resulting in a two-week pause of team activities that wiped out the team's three early nonconference games. The shutdown arose less than a week after the UConn men returned from a shutdown of their own due to a player testing positive.
With COVID-19 cases surging nationwide, UConn is far from the only school that needed to delay the start of its basketball season or pause things a few days in after someone contracted the virus. In the Big East alone, nine of 11 member schools have publicly disclosed temporary shutdowns for either one of their basketball teams this fall. Six teams have paused activities within the last two weeks.
In interviews with The Courant, public health and medical experts offered best practices as the NCAA moves forward with its season. Here's what those experts had to say about the risks of playing basketball and how programs can mitigate them moving forward.
