TC3 details outdoor sports commitments

Before high school sports were authorized to come back, Tompkins Cortland Community College made the decision to commit to the return of outdoor sports. On Jan. 14, TC3 stated that spring sports would be played with certainty. The Panthers were one of 13 community colleges in the region to set their date for a return to athletics.

Since then, Mick McDaniel, the school’s athletic director and head men’s soccer and women’s golf coach, has been handling scheduling duties and other preparation protocols. He explained what prompted them to make the decision last month.

“We gathered as much information as we could from local health departments to state guidelines and mandates and right on through for our NJCAA [National Junior College Athletic Association] protocols for all of our sports,” McDaniel said. “I think it was about six or eight weeks ago, when we were really in the middle of having practices in the fall and we were competitively running in cross-country, that we really felt that this was going to happen. So, being able to put our names down as one of the community colleges in New York that is going to compete felt very, very good.”

Of course, it’s not easy to compete in sports without opponents, and TC3 had to make sure it was not alone in the region when it came to its ambition to compete in athletics this academic year.

“Our region, Region 3 of the NJCAA, which is pretty much all of upstate New York, we meet at least weekly, and sometimes more than that,” McDaniel said. “We had a pretty good idea that the outdoor sports stood a good chance of playing. Even after declarations were signed, as far as these are the schools that want to come back, we understand that rosters may not be there. So, even though a school says yes, we want to compete, it’s really not until later in the fall early in the spring where schools definitely know they have enough students to compete and participate.”

If that situation does happen, adjustments are ready to be made and not much will change for TC3 in terms of its amount of competition.

“If a school decides that they’re going to not compete for whatever reason, the way the schedule is set up now really doesn’t change it very much because we’re staying within about a two-hour travel window,” McDaniel said. “We’ll make sure that any schools that need a little bit of a break or a pause for whatever reason, numbers or because they have a positive case, they’re taken care of too. To have a season this year is what we’re looking at as a success. We’re trying to put a little bit of the competitive edge aside. These student-athletes really want to play, and we want to give them that chance.”

The impact of COVID-19 on athletics at every level is well-documented. That includes the mental side of not being able to compete for an extended period of time. TC3 wanted to ensure that student-athletes would regain that familiar feeling of being on a team this academic year.

“What we’ve found is that when the student-athletes are part of our unit, part of our family and in contact with us on a regular basis, they’re in a much safer, a much healthier situation than it would be if they didn’t have any of these pursuits,” McDaniel said. “Being part of the team has actually benefited all of our student-athletes that were working with us in the fall. It’s just a matter of the sport itself is not dangerous, as far COVID goes, it’s the constant contact and how you can reduce that and how you can make sure that the participants are matched up because we have all these checks and balances for each other and we’re always holding each other accountable.”

On the administrative side, TC3 did not slow down one bit without the majority of sports in the fall and no sports in the winter of 2020.

“One of the things that we that we really made sure of early on in this is we stayed in touch with our with our current student-athletes from spring of 2020 and just urged them to keep on working and make sure they did well academically and gave them the confidence that we would provide something,” McDaniel said. “And in the fall, we did a lot of local recruiting. We just kept that rolling constantly. We signed 50 to 60 letters of intent virtually and kept on sharing that information. It was always based on what the feeling was in the comfort that our student-athletes and our coaches were going to have with getting back into play in the fall.”

It will be an incredibly busy spring at TC3. There will be simultaneous competition in baseball, golf, lacrosse, softball and soccer, which was moved from the fall. The Panthers have been at the forefront of making sure student-athletes are able to play, from having a cross-country season in the fall to being the first local school to commit to spring sports.