Hamilton College, NESCAC announce cancellation of 2020 fall sports season

Hamilton College, NESCAC announce cancellation of 2020 fall sports season

The 11 member schools of the NESCAC, including Hamilton College will not compete in interscholastic athletics in fall of 2020.

Conference - along with hamilton college - has cancelled its 2020 fall sports season due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision was made today after a pair of its 11 member schools had already cancelled their own fall seasons individually.

Both the nescac and hamilton will receive guidance from multiple health authorities at the federal - state and local levels - as well as the centers for disease control to determine a safe return to play.

Hamilton college said that once their students return to campus and have been tested for the virus - it plans to allow small group outdoor activity - hopefully leading into more formal team practices when conditions allow.

We caught up with hamilton college director of athletics jon hind tonight - who said this decision was not easy and came after many discussions both internally and throughout the conference.

Jon hind: a lot has been happening on campus already so we were pretty far down our path of decision making.

Just looking at the different procedures and protocols that we have to put in place on our campus, with the expectation of full return of our students, to mitigate risk we have really looked at minimizing travel both off campus and on campus.

When you start to get into conversations about limiting academic field trips and limiting speakers coming to campus, it all of the sudden becomes really difficult to talk about sending teams to williams or entertaining a team from trinity so just from our own standpoint on campus it was becoming really difficult to consider competition.

I feel horribly for all of the kids who are heading into their senior year especially, but all of the other kids.

Myself, the administrators, coaches, we do what we do so what we do will keep happening but the window of opportunity for student athletes is finite and so you feel really badly when they lose any of their opportunities.

Hind said there has been preliminary discussions within the conference about holding fall sports in the spring but that there are many steps before that would become a possibility.

He also said that the fate of winter and spring sports will be determined at a later date.

There is good news for hamilton college fall student-athletes along