LUT WILLIAMS, BCSP Editor
The ever-changing and growing COVID-19 pandemic has felled the sports program at another HBCU as BethuneCookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida announced Monday evening that it is shutting down athletics for the remainder of the 2020-21 school year.
In a letter to constituents late Monday, Bethune-Cookman President Dr. E. LaBrent Chrite announced that the university “will forgo all spring athletic competition” that includes competition in football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball and track and field. He cited a “recent spike in COVID-19 positivity rates” in the state of Florida, in Volusia Countty where the school is located and on the B-CU campus as reasons for the shutdown.
Like the other ten members of the Mid Eastern Athletics Conference, B-CU had postponed all sports schedules until now and had planned a full resumption of those activities beginning next month with men’s and women’s basketball.
B-CU’s decision comes just after the MEAC unveiled its new plans and full schedules (see below) last Thursday
for both basketball and football. Now, the conference will have to revamp that schedule without B-CU on its roster.
MEAC Commissioner Dr. Dennis Thomas addressed as best he could how B-CU’s shutdown will affect those schedules in a press conference via Zoom Monday afternoon.
“We will be making the appropriate adjustments to the schedule,” said Thomas while noting that the conference has committees on Health and Safety, Scheduling and Forecasting that have been anticipating potential changes to the schedule.
Thomas noted that the conference has set a Nov. 16 opt out deadline for member institutions and no detailed changes to the schedule would be made until after that date.
Chrite had posted an URGENT COVID-19 MESSAGE by video on Friday (Oct. 23) via social media outlets and on the Daytona Beach News-Journal website citing 15 positive tests for the virus on campus from the previous week. He said then that there were currently 30 students on campus in isolation and quarantine.
“The sudden spike raised a ton of eyebrows,” said B-CU Athletics Director Lynn Thompson who was on the MEAC Zoom call Monday.
“That trend line is neither acceptable or sustainable,” Crite said in the video while announcing that the school was going on “lock down” including an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew with all planned student activities cancelled and all classes on line as of Wednesday, October 28.
In Chrite’s letter, students were urged to “expedite their planned departure from campus beginning this week.”
B-CU’s move regarding athletics comes a week after Florida Memorial University, another HBCU in the state located in Opa Locka North, Miami Gardens, made a similar move.