Covid Impact on Conference Scheduling

Started by hopefan, July 22, 2020, 04:55:00 PM

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Greek Tragedy

The WIAC canceled all sports for the Fall Semester.
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PauldingLightUP

Quote from: Greek Tragedy on July 28, 2020, 05:57:35 PM
The WIAC canceled all sports for the Fall Semester.

I have not seen that Greek. Source?

jmcozenlaw

A former girlfriend's daughter played Field Hockey on the University of North Carolina national championship team a few years ago.

Now I know that's not the "Northeast", as they tawk funny.........and not like us at all. They have no clue what good cheesesteaks, hoagies and bagels taste like down there either!! ;)

Gregory Sager

"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

Gregory Sager

Quote from: jmcozenlaw on July 29, 2020, 09:39:32 AM
A former girlfriend's daughter played Field Hockey on the University of North Carolina national championship team a few years ago.

Now I know that's not the "Northeast", as they tawk funny.........and not like us at all. They have no clue what good cheesesteaks, hoagies and bagels taste like down there either!! ;)

Don't be fooled by that. D1 schools have been known to sponsor women's sports that are not popular in their areas, or that don't have much, if any, local recruiting potential due to a lack of local high schools and clubs that participate in that sport. Look at the current roster for the Tarheels field hockey team, for example. It almost entirely consists of residents of northeastern states, with a sprinkling of European players. There's a grand total of one North Carolina resident on the entire team.

The classic example of a D1 school sponsoring -- and excelling in -- a women's sport that isn't/wasn't played within their area is Northwestern women's lacrosse. The Wildcats became a national power and won five straight national championships in the mid-'00s before the sport really gained any footing in Chicagoland on the high-school level. Even today, only between 15-20% of Illinois high schools have girls lacrosse teams, most of them Chicagoland outer-ring suburban schools, private schools, or downstate big-town/small-city schools.

This particular fish-out-of-water phenomenon is an artifact of Title IX and the need to balance athletics offerings between women and men.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

Gregory Sager

Quote from: jmcozenlaw on July 28, 2020, 03:36:50 PM
Quote from: Gregory Sager on July 28, 2020, 01:31:39 PM
Field hockey is strictly a northeastern thing.

That used to be the case for lacrosse as well, but that sport has made some serious inroads in the midwest over the past generation. But I don't foresee field hockey following suit.

Thanks, I never knew that!! What does that make Squash (not the vile veggie either ;) ) ?

Squash isn't an NCAA-sponsored sport. But I can tell you that in terms of team competition it's very much a northeastern-only sport, and a class-based one at that. It's traditionally been a sport associated with the socioeconomic elite. (Frasier and Niles Crane conversing about their squash games at their country club was a running joke in the sitcom Frasier.) Your average midwesterner, southerner, or westerner barely even knows that the sport exists, let alone how it's played.

Intercollegiate squash competition is governed by the College Squash Association. Here's the list of the schools that sponsor men's varsity squash teams in the CSA. It's a list that's very telling in terms of both the narrowly regional interest and the traditional socioeconomic base of the sport:

https://csasquash.com/teams/mens-varsity/

Up until a few years ago, the only place that I'd ever seen a squash court here in Chicago was in Crown Field House at the University of Chicago. Nowadays, it's enjoying a bit of a fitness-industry boom nationally among yuppies, so various fitness clubs in the yuppie lakefront neighborhoods on Chicago's North Side as well as the more established health clubs in the Near North and the Loop are adding squash courts.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

ronk

 Squash makes more sense to me than handball which was too hard on the hands.   ;D

CNU85

I think at this point it might be easier to list the schools/conferences that have not announced their intentions, yet.

Anyone have that list? The story on d3sports.com has a loooooong list of schools that have announced what they are doing.  I wonder who we are waiting to hear from? Not that it really matters. Everyone/everything is done.

WUPHF

Field hockey and handball are both sports that could have been big at the college level but fell out of favor for whatever reason.  Racquetball too.

Field hockey is relatively popular in St. Louis and Louisville among other cities by the way.

Pat Coleman

Quote from: CNU85 on July 29, 2020, 12:01:50 PM
I think at this point it might be easier to list the schools/conferences that have not announced their intentions, yet.

Anyone have that list? The story on d3sports.com has a loooooong list of schools that have announced what they are doing.  I wonder who we are waiting to hear from? Not that it really matters. Everyone/everything is done.

The AMCC and the Landmark -- I've added clarification that the last Landmark statement was on June 9.
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Quote from: old 40 on September 25, 2007, 08:23:57 PMLet's discuss (sports) in a positive way, sometimes kidding each other with no disrespect.

gordonmann

QuoteIntercollegiate squash competition is governed by the College Squash Association. Here's the list of the schools that sponsor men's varsity squash teams in the CSA. It's a list that's very telling in terms of both the narrowly regional interest and the traditional socioeconomic base of the sport:

Trinity (Conn.) was a juggernaut in squash for a while, winning every match and championship for a span of 13 years (Eat your heart out, John Wooden!). I was there for the start of it and friends with the key recruit who started it all. Two things I always appreciated about Trinity's approach to squash.

First, those dudes generally worked hard in class and outside of it. They were clearly into the academic side of their experience. Same thing for the women's players.

Second, the men's coach was very open to people like me who had never heard of squash but liked to dink around on his courts. He taught squash for beginners and opened the facility up to the general student public. Imagine Coach K deciding to open Cameron Indoor to Duke's student body.

That was 20 years ago and, for all I know, the Bants may have a super-fancy facility restricted to the players. But they were about as proletarian as a squash team at a liberal arts school could be in the late 90s. :)

PauldingLightUP

Quote from: Gregory Sager on July 29, 2020, 10:24:44 AM
Quote from: PauldingLightUP on July 29, 2020, 08:55:40 AM
Quote from: Greek Tragedy on July 28, 2020, 05:57:35 PM
The WIAC canceled all sports for the Fall Semester.

I have not seen that Greek. Source?

How could you miss it? It's the lead story on the WIAC website.

Here it is:

https://wiacsports.com/news/2020/7/27/general-wiac-fall-statement-on-covid-19.aspx

Yes I did read that on Monday. But, the WIAC, in that release, has only canceled fall sports, not all sports in the fall semester. Winter sports in the fall semester still on for now in the WIAC.

jmcozenlaw

Quote from: WUPHF on July 29, 2020, 12:30:13 PM
Field hockey and handball are both sports that could have been big at the college level but fell out of favor for whatever reason.  Racquetball too.

Field hockey is relatively popular in St. Louis and Louisville among other cities by the way.

Field Hockey is slowly (and I mean slowly) starting to gain some traction at the middle school and high school level in areas out side of the Northeast. Not quite like how lacrosse has spread over the last decade, but it is growing.

Another ex-girlfriend (I have a trophy case full of exes........I bore quickly ;) ) has a daughter who plays field hockey at Bates and between her academic chops, her athletic prowess (and the fact she is a triplet.......with brothers at Georgetown and Harvard.......and another who was a stud on this past Ithaca's Hoops team).........she is almost going for free. The field hockey helped her very much. I'm stunned at the lack of interest or traction in chunks of the country.

Gregory Sager

Quote from: WUPHF on July 29, 2020, 12:30:13 PM
Field hockey and handball are both sports that could have been big at the college level but fell out of favor for whatever reason.  Racquetball too.

Field hockey is relatively popular in St. Louis and Louisville among other cities by the way.

That piqued my curiosity, so, since it's a slow day at work and I'm always willing to machete my way through really obscure jungles in the quest for more knowledge, I decided to take a look at the national sweep of field hockey on the high-school level.

The best place to do this is on Maxpreps, a high-school athletics site that covers a fairly large suite of interscholastic sports. Maxpreps lists 20 states as having high-school teams in the sport of field hockey. All of them are in the northeast, except for California, Colorado, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin (?!).

* California has over 200 high-school field hockey teams, so the sport is obviously well-established there (probably due to transplants from the northeast, at least originally).
* Colorado has 16 high-school field hockey teams, all fairly close to Denver.
* Kentucky has 20 high-school field hockey teams. Sure enough, as WUPHF said, it's Louisville-centric; seventeen of those teams are located in the 'ville proper, and two are in the suburbs. The outlier is down along the Tennessee border, which is strange. Almost all of these schools are private.
* Missouri has over 200 high-school field hockey teams. They're not just confined to metro St. Louis, either; the sport seems to cover much of the state.
* North Carolina has over 200 high-school field hockey teams. Most of them are in greater Charlotte and the Research Triangle, so this might be a transplant phenomenon as well.
* Ohio has 41 high-school field hockey teams. The sport is pretty well confined to the northeastern corner of the state, aside from a large pack of suburban high schools in metro Columbus.
* Texas has 20 high-school field hockey teams. They're all located in the Houston, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Austin areas, and they all seem to be private schools. This practically screams "transplants from Yankee Land."
* Virginia has over 200 high-school field hockey teams. Private schools are very heavily represented, as is the state's DC suburbs in the north.
* Wisconsin, bringing the weirdness, has nine high schools that offer field hockey. They're all private, and all but one are in greater Milwaukee.

The combination of private schools and wealthy-suburb public schools leads me to believe that most of these isolated pockets of field hockey outside of the northeast can be explained by white-collar northeasterners bringing the sport with them as they moved around the country for business; when a critical mass of them had daughters enrolled in those schools, field hockey teams sprouted up.

California is the transplant capital of the world, of course, and it has a well-known reputation for imitation and proliferation that would help to explain why it has so many field hockey teams. Virginia and North Carolina have comparatively large numbers of field hockey teams as well, but those two states have been inundated with damnyankees for a couple of generations now, as everybody knows. Still, we're only talking about roughly a third of NC high schools and about a quarter of VA high schools that offer the sport. And it's telling that UNC is still getting its players from the northeast rather than from the local schools, as indicated by the roster of the Tarheels that I linked earlier.

These transplant pockets aside, field hockey is still more or less a northeastern sport.

Missouri is the real outlier, though. It's hard to explain why the sport is played so widely across the Show Me State.

[/too much time on my hands today]
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

Gregory Sager

Weird that our field hockey posts were ten seconds apart, jmcozenlaw.

While I'm not sold on the idea that, California and Missouri notwithstanding, field hockey is going to gain traction outside of the northeast except in schools where well-heeled northeastern transplants are pushing for it, it's certainly doing a better job than girls ice hockey at proliferation. There's still fewer than 500 high schools in America that offer girls ice hockey, and about a third of them are in Minnesota. Yet there's around 70 D3 schools that offer it as a varsity sport, many of which are located in states that don't have it at the high-school level.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell