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The 2019 Washington Mystics were one of the best teams the WNBA has ever seen. They broke league records in 3-pointers, assists per game, and 25-point victories. They ended the season with the franchise’s first championship, allowing head coach Mike Thibault to hoist the championship trophy for the first time in his 17-season WNBA career.
Seven months later, Thibault is staring down a very different challenge: a seemingly endless offseason where most of his players don’t have access to so much as a basketball hoop.
“We’re trying to win the offseason, too,” Thibault said. “Are you getting better? Are you doing something to improve your game? ... I think we have a mature team, a team that knows what that should look like, and by all indications they’ve done the right things.”
Thibault said the team members have become “masters of Zoom calls” since the country began to shut down in the middle of March. The players video chat with their trainers. They consult with their strength coaches. They practice ball-handling, lifting, and band work. They study film and meet to discuss it minute-by-minute. They even sometimes call just to chat about life.
However, video workouts can’t come close to the real thing, especially if you’re unable to shoot the ball. That’s a concern as professional sports leagues come closer to solidifying pandemic-proof return plans.
The United States has already designated athletes as essential workers, paving the way for sports to return. There are two ways audiences could see WNBA players take the court again before a COVID-19 vaccine is readily available. One is to administer regular, ideally daily, testing to every athlete and staff member. The other is to create a closed “bubble,” where the only people allowed in would be those who have tested negative for COVID-19. If a player or staff member were to leave the bubble, they would have to quarantine themselves and then test negative before returning.
The WNBA is less than half the size than the NBA, with 12 teams to the men’s league’s 30 and fewer players on each roster. That means they would have far fewer players and personnel to contain within the bubble. Still, they will likely follow the NBA’s lead in reopening, although their relative size may make the transition easier.
“Having fewer people to test, or fewer people to sequester, makes it easier and lowers the aggregate risk that one of them is positive,” Dr. Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist and sports injuries researcher at Emory University, said.
Even within this closed system, some personnel would be at higher risk than others. A quarter of the WNBA’s 12 head coaches, including Thibault, are 65 or older, which is the age group most at risk from the coronavirus. That doesn’t even account for the rest of the coaching staff and other personnel necessary to administrate a game.
“I think there’s an appropriate focus on the players, but you have to consider that bringing people back to play a sport entails bringing them back to practice their sport, bringing back athletic trainers, bringing back physical therapists … and those folks are not necessarily elite athletes themselves,” Dr. Gretchen Snoeyenbos-Newman, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Washington, said. “So, any plan you come up with has to include the entire ecosystem of people who support the players and train the players.”
Whatever system the WNBA develops in order to return can’t single out these higher-risk individuals, Drs. Binney and Snoeyenbos-Newman say; it must be built to accommodate them.
“It’s all about the system that you build up, and that system should be built up with these higher risk people in mind, and minimizing the risk of anyone getting infected because anyone within that system could spread it to anyone else within that system,” Dr. Binney said. “I don’t think you should try to isolate coaches within the system, you should try to build the system to meet their needs.”
One lingering question is how long after diagnosis a patient remains contagious. Although the coronavirus can be spread without the patient displaying symptoms, it’s unclear how long that threat would linger if an athlete were to test positive. Dr. Snoeyenbos-Newman and the University of Washington believe that a three-day waiting period after symptoms subside is the key to ensuring there is no chance of spreading the virus.
“You need to stay home for seven days or until you have had no symptoms… whichever of those is longer,” Dr. Snoeyenbos-Newman said. “...Then you stay home for 72 additional hours of feeling much, much better. That, for us, our data shows has worked.”
A safe return to professional basketball during the pandemic would likely involve a combination of these factors: regular testing, a closed system, and neutral sites for play, such as the live-in village suggested in the NWSL reopening plan..
Any plan involves sacrifice to some degree. Players may go months without seeing their families and endure painful nasal swabs every morning; meanwhile, the public may have to accept tests being allocated for use by professional athletes while availability for the rest of the country differs.
Quickly deciding how much sacrifice can be justified is important, as the financial pressure for professional sports to return is enormous. The WNBA signed a 2019 deal with CBS Sports to broadcast their games on widely-viewed cable television rather than smaller subscriber channels. Without those games, there is no advertising revenue to offset the funds draining rapidly from unused arenas.
“Every owner in the state’s going to lose a lot of money this year to play,” Thibault said. “There’s no way around it. I don’t mean a little bit of money, I mean a lot of money… [Ted Leonsis] owns us, the Wizards, the Capitals, the Go-Go and the District Gaming and the arena, and [he’s] missing out on concert revenue on top of it. That’s a huge ask.”
The financial incentives, to collect broadcast money if not ticket revenue, are forcing some leagues to return ahead of schedule. The UFC restarted fights despite positive COVID-19 tests, and NASCAR resumed races without testing drivers for the coronavirus. Binney sees those decisions as irresponsible.
“If you have an organization like the UFC or like NASCAR, they came back this past weekend without doing any testing, then that can send a bad message,” Dr. Binney said. “... Sports leagues are role models and they have to recognize that responsibility, but they can be a force for good or bad.”
This function as a role model is particularly important during a politicized pandemic. According to a recent Gallup survey, almost 85% of Democrats said they’d recently worn a mask in public, while less than 50% of Republicans said the same. Many public officials still appear reluctant to wear them in televised events in an effort to avoid encouraging a negative outlook on the pandemic. Last week, despite the governor of Georgia publicly urging his constituents to wear masks, he himself went without one in a televised meeting with the U.S. Vice President.
If masks and social distancing are normalized as part of sports returning, it could help bridge the partisan divide over whether to wear a mask. Dr. Snoeyenbos-Newman is one of the founding editors of COVID 101, a website where the public can ask doctors questions about the coronavirus. One of the questions she receives most often is whether everyone can safely wear a mask.
“The answer is, almost everyone can safely wear a mask,” said Dr. Snoeyenbos-Newman. “Children under two or people who can’t remove the mask themselves are the people who probably shouldn’t wear masks.”
Other than that, Snoeyenbos-Newman said there should be no debate. Everyone should wear a mask in public—including players when they are not on the court.
Sports can also help model a new normal. In Taiwan, baseball teams filled the stands with socially-distanced robot mannequins in place of fans, a striking visual example of what a crowd must look like in 2020. If fans see a crowd spread out across an arena, maybe they’ll be more likely to sit six feet apart in a public park. And if they see Tina Charles wearing a mask, maybe they’ll feel better about putting on their own to head to the grocery store.
“Sports can really be a model of how to return to a sense of normalcy in a safe way,” Dr. Snoeyenbos-Newman said. “Having sports with no fans, having sports teams who are wearing masks and exhibiting appropriate social distancing and excellent hand hygiene and all of this, that is a powerful message to people that these things are both socially acceptable and important.”
The return of WNBA and other professional sports is inherently risky. Groups of people engaging in physical contact, whether it’s players grappling over a ball or a trainer adjusting a knee brace, means that there is a risk of contagion. For them to return safely requires a high level of confidence in the leagues’ abilities to contain the virus.
“There are going to be risks for society in general,” Thibault said. “But ... what I know about our league and other pro sports is that we’re not going to move ahead without being pretty sure of where we are on the ratio of risk.”
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.