Mike Young discusses Covid Measures and restraints ahead of season opener

Chris Hirons

November 12, 2020

BLACKSBURG, Va. — When Virginia Tech men’s basketball players walk into practice on Monday morning, they’re typically greeted with a smile and a simple question from the coaching staff.

Head coach Mike Young asks his players, “How was your weekend?”.

A player’s response is some sort of variation that goes like this: “You know, it was great. I didn’t do a thing.”

With covid cases in an uptick across the nation, Young and his players understand that if they want to have any success in playing out a college basketball season this year, the key is sitting around at home.

The NCAA doesn’t have the ability to bubble wrap players like the NBA did in the summer. Like college football, student-athletes are exposed to the general public, and in a time of uncertainty, personal responsibility sets in since a single positive covid test could force a program to begin a two-week hiatus.

“[The players] want to play and they understand the only way we can finish out the season is to take care of themselves — personal accountability,” Young said. “And at the same time, it’s about taking care of one another. I’ve been so impressed with our team’s discipline and how they have adhered to the things set forth by our medical team.”

Earlier in the fall, Virginia Tech’s football team’s surge in positive coronavirus tests forced the team to cease operations for a little less than a week. The uptick in cases forced Tech to cancel its season opening game against Virginia on Sept. 17 and continued to hamper the Hokies for about a month in total, wiping out entire position groups until VT played Boston College on Oct. 17.

Young, like most realists, sees that the virus will likely affect the basketball team at some point during the season as well. He and his staff are doing their best, though, to attempt to limit transmission if one of his student-athletes were to come down with the virus.

“We think about it all the time,” Young said. “In practice, the biggest problem we were having when we were in close contact with one another was when I would bring a group over and we would talk about something, or diagram a play. So now, we’ve thought about that during our timeouts and how we’re going to be spaced and we never bring the team together as a unit while they’re on the practice floor.”

After scheduling non-conference meetings with Oklahoma State, Davidson, George Washington and Marshall, the Hokies were forced to scrap those games as a result of the NCAA mandating a later start date for the college basketball season. Sitting with the ACC schedule in front of them, Young’s staff quickly had to piece together a seven-game non-conference slate.

For Young, he said the experience of putting together the non-conference schedule which includes the likes of Radford, Longwood, Penn State, VMI, Coppin State, Temple and USF was ‘foreign’.

“[On the original schedule], we would have played four games prior to the new start date,” Young said. “You are literally sitting there in the office with your staff and you have nothing … You want to do everything you can to take care of your team and prepare your team as best as you can heading into ACC play.”

For the Hokies and the cap of reduction to seven non-conference matchups, there’s an obvious cause for concern heading into ACC play. In a normal year, VT would have already played an exhibition game or two and would have film to review in player and staff meetings, even before starting non-conference play.

“This is uncharted territory,” Young said. “We have one charge and that’s to make the best of it that we can for the team and hopefully win a number of games.”