LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – The University of Louisville took the path of law and order on Thursday, kicking three players off the men’s soccer team and suspending three more in the wake of a large social gathering that wound up being connected via contact tracing to at least 29 positive cases of COVID-19 among athletes, and prompting the temporary shutdown of four fall sports.
Athletics director Vince Tyra was understandably upset. The school has spent a lot of time and money to train athletes how to navigate this situation. Having to announce 29 of those athletes tested positive from a single event is embarrassing to the university, and it’s a scary thing from a health standpoint.
Soccer coach John Michael Hayden was similarly miffed, citing past transgressions to remove the three soccer players from the team, and nullifying their scholarships. Admittedly, a high price to pay.
“It is clear that these student-athletes did not meet the code of conduct of the university or their team,” Tyra said. “Ignoring the safety protocols issued by federal, state and local officials, as well as the athletic department, is unacceptable and dangerous. Their history of actions are not in alignment with the values of this university and athletics department."
This is where I call timeout. That’s pretty blunt talk about three students you’ve just kicked off a team. Generally, we get “violation of team rules.” Generally, we don’t have reference to “history.” That statement packed a bit more punch.
I don’t know these players. Most people reading this don’t either. But let me tell you the perspective of one of them, a local product, Cameron Wheeler. He never dreamed he’d be approached by national media, and doesn’t relish the idea of being made a poster boy for coronavirus carelessness. In fact, on the night in question, he said he and some friends were just looking to celebrate having made it through a month and a half of following the rules without testing positive. Now, he's off the team.
“I love U of L and the program,” Wheeler said in a statement provided to WDRB. “I’m from here and it was special to play in front of the crowds. I’ve known Coach Hayden since I was 10, and attended camps and worked for years to play for him here. I was proud to earn a scholarship. . . . I will miss my teammates and the program.”
First off, he said, he never intended to "have a party," and certainly did not organize one. He lives with five teammates in what he described as “a gated group of houses leased to many student-athletes.” They’ve been there since reporting back to campus on June 15, along with many other athletes. They’d completed the voluntary portion of their workouts COVID-free. Had just tested negative. Again. All six of them had. They were going to celebrate. They’d been careful. They were going to hang out. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do. They told another teammate he could come over. Seven guys having a good time.
Except it wasn’t just seven. The teammate brought a few people, including a couple that Wheeler didn’t know. And, if you’ve been around these things, you know they can escalate quickly. And let’s not sugar-coat it, it got out of hand. Now, it wasn’t Snoop Dog-coming-on-stage-in-Old-School wild, but it definitely outgrew its originally scheduled parameters. I’ll let the player tell it in his own words.
“We didn’t plan a ‘party’ or large gathering last Saturday,” Wheeler said. “We didn’t invite a crowd to come to our house. One other student-athlete who had also just tested negative for COVID was invited to come over and hang out with us. This violated no rule. Several uninvited student-athletes followed him in. They said they were also COVID free. But, things escalated quickly. Athletes from multiple teams were let in by others we hadn’t invited. I didn’t know many of them. This made it more difficult to try to get the situation under control. We tried shutting it down and getting people to leave, but it took over an hour.”
You can imagine, a bunch of college kids who have been cooped up for a long time, distancing and testing, don’t need much excuse to flock to such a gathering, once they get wind of it.
A day later, Wheeler said he told his assigned athletic trainer what had happened and that he could have been exposed. He reported the incident to the athletic department. He followed the guidelines for potential exposure.
But, he added, “We were unable to convince anyone that we hadn’t intended for this to happen.”
This, the department decided, was one of those “should have known” situations. Players should have known it would escalate. The university rejected that line of argument when it involved its basketball coach. It probably wouldn’t apply that reasoning to its soccer coach. Some of us might look at this whole situation and say that administrators should have known something like it would happen.
Before the week was out, the incident was being talked about on SportsCenter and Wheeler was wondering what his next steps would be.
I guess, because I worked with college students when I was a college student, my tolerance for this kind of thing is pretty high, maybe too much so. I was a resident assistant for three years. I was the resident assistant for the soccer team. I can pretty well promise you that there were parties on my floor that were more rowdy than this one in question. I didn’t attend them, but I knew about them. It probably wasn’t some of my best work, but I figured I’d rather have them drinking there than going out and driving back. We all survived.
Times have changed, and this virus has upped the ante on everything. Still, I’m not comfortable with the power structure of a large university – with extremely well-paid coaches and administrators – showing so little grace to students in the midst of an unprecedented situation.
Who put all those athletes in the same complex? Who was there supervising? And more than that, why paint a young man as a problem player when his worst previous transactions included getting a bad grade (he retook the class), leaving a team hotel to walk around campus on a road trip (not a violation of an existing team rule), and showing up 2 minutes late to a workout that everyone was told (for NCAA purposes) was voluntary? Is that step necessary?
I get it. It’s all about optics. It should be about education. I don’t mean to say that this isn’t a serious thing. Let’s hope that everyone involved recovers quickly and moves on without complications. Let’s also understand that everyone at that gathering was there voluntarily.
And let’s also not ignore that the very act of bringing these athletes to campus and asking them to play sports at all is putting them at risk. The university has not disclosed all positive tests to the public, so we have no way of judging how well its protocols are or are not working.
Was this worth suspending players over? Yes, it was. Sure. But let’s understand, this event wasn’t intended to flaunt the COVID training the players had been provided. It got out of hand. But a lot of us who have experienced college kids quite a bit find ourselves asking, “What did you expect?”
At the very least, let’s not make any of these athletes out to be villains. Stupid, yeah, that night, they were – though they didn’t start out to be. And they certainly didn’t want to put themselves and others at risk. It just doesn’t take long for something bad to happen. Hopefully, everybody will be able to move on and play another day.
Wheeler and two of his teammates won’t get that opportunity at U of L. That’s the university’s call.
But the university and its administration aren’t without responsibility in this. You bring them to campus, you assume the risk. It’s easy to blame students, even to kick them out. But there are going to be some of us who will say, you, too, should have known.
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