CC’s Entire Hockey Team Goes into Quarantine After Player Tests Positive for COVID-19
Plus, plans for Winter Celebration and May commencement ceremonies
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date last year, Colorado College students were finding their classrooms for the first day of Block 4. (This year, students are rolling out of bed and turning on their computers to Zoom into class from around the world).
Today, we talk to CC Athletics about four recent positive COVID-19 cases among the student-athlete population. Also, two CC staff members explain the status of CC’s Winter Celebration and May commencement ceremonies.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained the status of contact-tracing in El Paso County and her thoughts on the early Pfizer vaccine results.
✉️In Your Inbox:
Colorado College has joined the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center’s newly established Liberal Arts Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Alliance. Beginning in January, the center will host a series of monthly virtual sessions on racial equity.
The college has developed four Alert Levels to guide on-campus operations. CC is currently in Level 1.
Last week, CC reported that a staff member working in Honnen Ice Arena received a positive COVID-19 test result. The notification was an error, and the college now says that person actually received a negative test result.
Wastewater testing last week revealed a small concentration of viral particles in South Hall. As a precaution, students living in South Hall were asked to participate in swab testing.
On Thin Ice: Hockey schedule ‘up in the air’ after positive test, team quarantine
Even through a global pandemic, CC hockey prevails. At least that was the plan until yesterday.
In the past week, members of the Colorado College community received a series of COVID-19 notifications: One student-athlete who had been in El Pomar Sports Center received a positive COVID-19 test result on Nov. 6. Four days later, two more student-athletes received positive test results. Then yesterday, the college announced a member of CC’s hockey team tested positive.
About 77% of CC’s student-athlete population, roughly 350 students, have still been practicing since the beginning of the fall semester, even after the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference punted away all fall Division III games. But when the first three student-athletes caught COVID-19, the college put all varsity team practices, except for ice hockey, on pause as a precaution.
Luckily for CC’s contact-tracers, the athletic department tracks who works out when and where. Student-athletes with possible exposure to the virus got swabbed and entered into quarantine while they waited for test results.
“This was not connected to a large gathering or party, which some of the larger universities have seen,” COVID-19 Emergency Manager Maggie Santos, who also directs Campus Safety, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Starting Monday, outdoor sports teams began practicing outside again, per county guidelines, according to Vice President & Director of Athletics Lesley Irvine, and they opened the varsity weight room at 25% capacity.
At the time we were pulling together this newsletter, it looked like CC’s hockey players were going to be the one team to escape the paused practices. But then a hockey player tested positive too, and as a result, all members of the CC ice hockey team, some coaches, and some support staff entered into quarantine.
Jerry Cross, Director of Athletics Communications, said because of the quarantine, hockey practices will be put on hold for the next two weeks. As for the rest of their season, Cross said campus leadership and the National Collegiate Hockey Conference are discussing what this might mean for future competition.
A Twitter statement from conference leadership:
When asked if the team quarantine will change any practice, game, or travel plans, Cross told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: “A lot of that is up in the air.”
As the only CC sports team currently still scheduled to compete during Pandemic Fall, the men’s hockey team planned to start their season on Dec. 1.
If the original plan still stands, hockey players and support staff are scheduled to travel to Omaha, Nebraska on Nov. 28, where they will play their first 10 games in a pod format.
“Essentially, what we've done is try to reduce risk by reducing travel, and then manage what we can control,” Irvine said.
The hockey players would stay in a hotel closed to the public with three other teams. Even before the student-athlete tested positive yesterday, CC planned to require all hockey players and support staff to quarantine before they leave as a safety precaution.
Irvine said a big reason the conference chose the University of Nebraska Omaha's Baxter Arena for the hockey-pod games is that they have a full hospital and medical facility as part of their campus. “So there's going to be a fully robust medical team and infrastructure to oversee this,” she said.
The NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association that CC belongs to, has outlined standard COVID guidelines for sports teams practicing and competing this season. The state of the county a team resides in, however, would determine any decision to stop competing because of the coronavirus.
“It was actually determined that it would make most sense to follow your county guidelines and your campus guidelines as far as where your numbers in your contexts were,” Irvine said.
For the rest of their season, the hockey team would return to Colorado Springs and play their last 16 games at the Broadmoor World Arena.
Other CC sports teams are scheduled to begin their seasons in January and have been practicing regularly aside from last week’s blip. Additionally, nine club sports teams were actively participating until El Paso County moved their dial to “Level Orange: High Risk” last Wednesday.
For Irvine, a positive outlook is key to managing the stress associated with the pandemic.
“I've always felt that it's very hard to lead if you're not an optimist,” she said. “Our students and coaches look to us for hope and for positivity. So every day I work on that and being resilient through all of this.”
Winter Celebration, May commencement still in flux
For Colorado College’s Director of College Events Brenda Soto, the most difficult aspect of working during the pandemic has been the uncertainty with which she has had to plan campus events.
“I think 2020 is about being flexible,” Soto told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “We're trying to be as flexible as possible, especially with events.”
With the Winter Celebration — which traditionally acknowledges the achievements of mid-year graduates around the middle of December — fast approaching, Soto said flexibility is a major factor in her team’s upcoming plans.
“It's going to be virtual, obviously,” Soto said. “In events, we're working on the levels that campus safety has designated.”
As Soto explained, much of the planning she and her team do is dictated by CC’s Alert Levels, which were launched earlier this month in order to “guide risk-mitigation, operations, and interaction across campus.”
So far, College Events has planned for this year’s Winter Celebration to be virtual, but as Colorado College’s Registrar Phil Apodaca explained, this year’s addition of the J Block in January to the fall semester has made it difficult to determine how many mid-year graduates there will be.
“The J Term's going to prolong our ability to know who's finished, right, to process,” Apodaca told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “Because some of these students may need the J Term.”
Soto and Apodaca have planned to meet during the first week of December to determine how many mid-year graduates there will be and from that, the best time to hold the Winter Celebration. Until then, they said the gathering is still up in the air.
But one thing College Events has done to work through the possibilities available to them has been to turn to the student body. For example, in looking ahead to May’s commencement ceremonies, College Events posted a survey asking seniors how they would prefer to walk for their graduation, with two suggestions being a socially-distant ceremony or smaller, department-based ceremonies.
Soto said she and her team found the results of that survey to be both surprising and helpful because students typically preferred alternatives College Events thought they wouldn’t.
“We want to make sure it's meaningful,” Soto said. “Not only for the class of 2021, but we're also thinking about the class of 2020 too because they didn't have a commencement either.”
At the end of the day, Soto predicted both events will come down to the wire, mainly due to the unpredictable circumstances the pandemic has wrought on college events.
“Things are coming together very last-minute,” Soto said. “Not on purpose, but because we have to ... we're really going week-to-week depending on the level that we're at.”
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, Isabel Hicks, and Esteban Candelaria in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear every Monday.
The project seeks to provide frequent updates about CC and other higher education institutions during the pandemic by providing original reporting, analysis, interviews with campus leaders, and context about what state and national headlines mean for the CC community.
📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get the newsletter in your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or news tips by emailing ccreportingproject@gmail.com.