Illinois College canceled Student Athlete Week last week due to COVID-19 concerns. The Student-Athlete Advisory Committee at IC planned to have activities such as scavenger hunts, past games being watched on the football field, and social media posts during the week last week to help promote bonding among the sports team as well as the rest of the student community.
The head of the Committee Jen McCormick, who is the Head Women’s Basketball coach, says that the week has been postponed due to COVID-19 concerns: “We were told towards the end of [the previous] week that we had to cancel those in-person events and you know again trying to promote safety among the students and not have groups too large. We were going to be able to have just 50 [people] originally in each space, but we were told we needed to make those changes, so those events had to be cancelled.”
McCormick is hopeful that the week will be rescheduled for when students return to campus after Christmas break: “We thought it would be better to push that back to next semester when we were all back in person and be a kickoff to the semester. Hopefully, things have been able to open up and change and be able to have the events the way we were hoping to. So we have got some more time to plan to tweak things as things change and we have at least done all of the work at this point. Then, we will be able to adjust anything that we need to, so we still feel good about it. We still plan on doing that. Our plan right now is to have it the week of January 25th.”
This comes on the wake of Illinois College making the decision to have all sports teams cancel practices due to case counts rising on campus. The SAAC has also had to cancel other projects due to COVID-19 guidelines earlier in the year, such as the Special Olympics and Trick-or-Treat for canned goods.