Ensor optimistic MAAC will be able to play basketball amid COVID-19

Rich Ensor released scheduling model for MAAC Thursday morning, and commissioner remains confident in his conference being able to fit as much basketball as possible into 2020-21 season amid COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Sports Business Daily)

When most conferences were scrambling to cancel what was left of their conference tournaments on the morning of March 12, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference was among the last leagues still playing out the remnants of a 2019-20 season that would be preempted by the COVID-19 pandemic mere hours later.

The MAAC’s decision to wait was not for lack of information, however, as commissioner Rich Ensor wanted to ensure that everything was laid out on the table in detail before making the call to bring his conference championships to a screeching halt.

“As we started that morning and got to the arena, we had a meeting with our athletic directors and senior women’s administrators, and we were talking about what we were doing with basketball and spring sports,” Ensor recalled as he detailed the course of action from the MAAC’s tournament setup in Atlantic City six months ago. “At that point, and frankly throughout the weekend, at no point were we told by the state of New Jersey or Atlantic City that we would have to shut down the tournament. It was really just the cascading number of decisions that were being made across the country locking down tournaments, so I convened a meeting of the MAAC Council of Presidents, and it all just came to a head at some point where it looked like the NCAA was going to shut it down later that day, so it made sense to shut it down and send the athletes home, and ensure that they get to a safe environment.”

The safe environment continues to be the main objective entering the fourth quarter of 2020, with Ensor and the MAAC unveiling a scheduling model Thursday that will see each of the conference’s 11 members condense a 20-game league schedule into 12 weeks, with games on Tuesday and Friday each week, plus a built-in window at the end of February to allow for rescheduling of games that may ultimately be postponed due to positive COVID-19 tests incurred during the year.

“During that process, we were talking about, ‘How do we want to approach basketball this year? What’s our major focus and goal as we look to start the season, and how do we achieve it?’ Ensor said as he described the working group the MAAC set up among presidents Patrick Leahy (Monmouth), Gregory Dell’ Omo (Rider), Seamus Carey (Iona) and Mark Nemec (Fairfield), along with Quinnipiac senior women’s administrator Sarah Fraser and athletic directors Bill Maher (Canisius), Tim Murray (Marist) and John D’Argenio (Siena). “It’s been a three-month process, and first of all, we established the goal of the safety of the student-athletes, coaches, and everyone involved with the games. That goal was the bedrock upon which we built our basketball model, and the second goal within the basketball model was that the focus had to be on completing the conference season. All else was secondary.”

“As you look at our model and the spacing, we rapidly decided two games a week, three days between games. The dates themselves were determined by our contract with ESPN. We’re waiting for the NCAA to tell us what the testing protocols are going to be for basketball. It looks like it’s going to require three tests a week, so when we were building the model, we used that as a guide. If we have to do three tests a week, how much time do we need between games in order to do these tests? That’s how that was all built. Now if the NCAA comes back with a different testing model, and they may very well, then we may be able to condense that back to two-day spacing. The open week was really an opportunity to have some space built in where games could be rescheduled if needed because of any disruptions caused by the pandemic.”

As a commissioner of a basketball-centric conference, Ensor and his staff were able to get out ahead of Power 5 leagues currently preoccupied with managing football during the pandemic, and as such, were able to devise the aforementioned framework. With limited resources in comparison to the heavyweights of Division I, Ensor recognized the need to be both proactive and fiscally responsible, the latter coming into play when the MAAC assessed potential non-conference bubble scenarios that were ultimately deemed too expensive for the league to operate.

“We were proactive because we have a basketball focus in this league,” he reiterated. “We work on basketball 24/7, 12 months all year, so it was just natural for us to get working on these models as soon as we could. When we started the process, we were only thinking about conference games for the whole season. We did a lot of work on a bubble at the Albany Convention Center that would also have used the Times Union Center, and we also looked at a bubble model with the America East Conference, but it was just too expensive, frankly, for what we were going to get out of it.”

“We don’t know that November 25 is going to be the first day yet. It could very well be pushed back into December. We’re all hoping we get there on the 25th, but as we’ve seen with other sports, we could certainly have disruptions. The thing about the MAAC model is we can adjust it based on whatever start date they come up with, because we did build in some extra time there at the end of the season to where we could move games if we had to.”

The commissioner also announced that fans would not be permitted at MAAC games until December 23 at the earliest, as all parties involved continue to adapt to a season that will have a different look and feel, but the same end game. Despite the sacrifices made on and off the floor, Ensor still believes the season will be able to get off the ground for the most part, even if he still draws the line at saying it will be completed in full.

“I’m confident we’re going to have a season,” he declared. “When you say completed, with all teams playing 20 games, I’m less confident about that. We may have different amounts of games completed depending on what kind of disruptions we run into, but we do have tiebreakers and other policies in place to figure out how that’ll be handled. I’m confident that we’ll have a season, but when you say completed, that’s open to interpretation.”