Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
He’s been involved in college athletics for six decades. He was a baseball player, a successful coach, a hall of fame administrator and now a professor of graduate-level courses in sport and yet nothing has quite prepared him for what he’s now witnessing during the coronavirus pandemic:
- The sports world has gone dark.
- Several athletes around the world have been infected by COVID-19 and some – including 11 Olympic athletes in Iran, reports Radio Farda – have died.
- The threat of unsafe conditions for both the athletes and the fans make it a real possibility there will be no college football in the fall or, at the very least, not the 100,000-plus packed stadiums you’re used to seeing at Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State.
- Without a vaccine, you may not see any fans at the Dayton Dragons’ Day Air Ballpark this summer and maybe not the sold-out crowds at Dayton Flyers games at UD Arena come winter.
- The reality that some college sports – the University of Cincinnati just disbanded its men’s soccer program Tuesday, Old Dominion dumped wrestling earlier this month, Temple cut seven sports last month – will disappear from many schools altogether because of the financial fallout from the pandemic.
- The belief that some colleges will do away with athletic programs altogether.
- And the threat that some small colleges may close their doors and fold completely.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking how the world is going to change,” Mike Cusack, the longtime Wright State athletics director said a couple of days ago from his home in The Villages, the adult retirement community in central Florida that he and his wife Dot moved to four years ago.
Like the rest of us, he’s trying to come to grips with what life will be like once we manage to get through the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended so much of life around the globe.
For Cusack there is an additional timeline. Since retiring as AD in 2012, he’s been an adjunct professor teaching online courses at WSU and his class “The Role of Athletics in Higher Education” begins in just a few weeks. And then in the fall he’ll be teaching “Current Issues in American Sports.”
