Coaches in Masks May be the New Normal When Football Returns

Programs around the country, including Ole Miss, are making preparations for a potential return to some sort of football in early June. It's just going to look very, very different.

Programs around the country, including Ole Miss, are making preparations for a potential return to some sort of football in early June.

It's just going to look... very, very different. 

At least for the an interim period, there's a high likelihood coaches and staff will be wearing masks and gloves when working with teams. Temperature tests will be taken at the entrance to facilities, similar to a hospital. Weight rooms will have to be re-arranged to enable social distancing and showers may be shut down.

At least early on, all football will be non-contact. 

"It will be the new norm," says Tory Lindley, president of the National Athletic Trainers' Association and an associate athletic director at Northwestern told SI. "It will be the best we can do. We're all hoping to put forward the safest environment for our student-athletes."

The SEC is set to vote on Friday, May 22 on the potential return of athletes to campus on June 1. Even then, facilities will be open but everything would be voluntary workouts. 

May, June and July are typically the slow months of the calendar. Spring football is in the rearview and training camp on the August horizon. But this year, we didn't get spring football. Some coaches are optimistic about getting an extension to the standard training camp allowances, but that's yet to be determined.

Step one is just getting everyone back. But even that's not so simple.

"You don’t flip a switch and everybody's back to normal," says Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin. "You can't invite 500 back at one time. You have to have small groups."

When talking to Ole Miss officials involved in the decision making process earlier this month, the school said it will likely bring athletes back in waves, beginning with upperclassmen. 

The hope is that testing will be more readily available whenever this happens, but that may not be as much of a reality as we once thought when having those initial discussions. 

"The hope, and we anticipate this being a reality, is that we have tests for everyone by the time students and athletes start coming back over the next few months," Dr. Marshall Crowther, Ole Miss Athletics' Medical Director, told The Grove Report earlier this month. "We anticipate being able to adequately test players frequently."

For a little while, contact will be prohibited. Practices will take place in small groups and any sort of state-wide or local social distancing protocols will have to be abided by. That helps in Mississippi, as statewide and local regulations are easing up. 

For now, most are just optimistic about some semblance of football, even if it looks very, very different from what we're used to. 

"I think everybody wants to start back to something that feels normal," says TJ Meagher, an associate athletic director at the University of Houston.  "We've been through something so extraordinary. Anything that makes us feel normal or a pathway back to normal, we're excited about."

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