If he’s not on a Zoom call or in a Microsoft meeting, he’s on the phone with people in the governor’s office, working with the folks in Harrisburg to ensure Penn State is following their edicts, by sharing the university’s strategic plan. Most days Heck has three computer screens open in front of him, plotting, planning and spread-sheeting. “We’re hoping we can get 12 games in,’’ Morett-Curtiss says. National team facility in Lancaster, but that’s a two-hour drive away, or traveling for multi-team events in Virginia Beach, Va., but that runs headlong into quarantining and travel issues. The turf inside Holuba Hall, the football team’s practice bubble, could serve the soccer teams, but it won’t work for the field hockey team … and what happens when football returns for spring practice? The field hockey team is looking at using the U.S. Right now Heck has start dates, end dates and a lot of wishful thinking in between. But understanding when to start and how are not the same. The entire department essentially is working backward, looking at when a team’s championship is scheduled and then determining when to start practices. “I joke that I know the names of the facilities, but it’s hard to remember what key goes to what,’’ he says with a good-natured laugh. Heck arrived in State College last January, leaving Butler, his alma mater, for the bigger job.
He and his full-time crew of six also have to manage the various weight rooms and training facilities on campus, find staffing for events, give each space its proper cleaning and ensure that everyone - from his own staff to game management personnel - follows COVID-19 protocols.
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But come January, he has to figure out how to find places for field hockey and two soccer teams to play outdoors, and work the women’s volleyball practice and competition schedule into a Rec Hall building that already houses men’s volleyball practices and matches, men’s and women’s gymnastics meets and wrestling, as well as the soccer locker rooms. Penn State’s senior associate director for capital, events and facilities, Heck has 17 unique sports facilities, and in a normal world that’s plenty. “The 10 pounds don’t exactly fit in the five-pound bag.’’ Using Penn State as an example applicable to many, The Athletic spoke to a cross section of people in the university’s athletic department, including coaches, athletes, facilities directors, academic advisers and sports medicine personnel about the task ahead. “It is really complicated,’’ says athletic director Sandy Barbour.
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No school, not even one with all of the advantages and resources that Penn State enjoys, is equipped to handle all of that. (Of course, football will be about to kick off spring practice.) That’s around 720 athletes all in need of practice and game space, sports medicine attention, academic services, travel itineraries and all of the other accoutrements that make D1 sports go. By February, as winter sports play toward their championships, spring sports either launch or gear up in the preseason and fall sports restart, all but football will be in some version of competition. Including football, some 850 athletes call Penn State home.
In reality, even the biggest schools with the deepest pockets have limitations. It all sounds plausible, and in the fantasyland version of a college campus, where staffing, acreage and budgets are bottomless, it would work out just fine. The NCAA reworked its championship structure, moving fall Olympic sport national tournaments to March and through mid-May, and some conferences (the Big Ten among them) opted to punt the start of those seasons until January In the fit to outrun a virus that already is working to lap the country, athletic administrators seized on a plan to squish everything save football into 2021, pinning their hopes on some combination of time, testing, a vaccine and a miracle to make that which isn’t doable in 2020 possible in 2021. Pulling off a football game right now is so complex it merits one of those cartoon rewinds to show how the Nittany Lions even got there.īut the department party will end quicker than a company holiday bash with a cash bar. No doubt, there will be equal rejoicing in and around the university’s athletic department offices.
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