News Comment #2

In this weeks news comment, I read an article from the New York Times that was about college sports and how the University of Cal Berkley is dealing a pandemic problem solution.

In the article, author John Branch followed and question UC Berkley’s athletic Director Jim Knowlton. Knowlton describes how hectic and crazy these past 5 months have been for the University and for himself. Jim hasn’t been on campus since March, and since his return to his office, decisions were made and new policies preventing the spread of COVID were in place. Since the outbreak and immediate cancellation of college sports, every University has been working hard to try and figure out the right solution for what fall sports should do.

Should they play? Should they not play? This has been the question roaming every Universities head, every college athlete and every fan across America. From a financial standpoint, how would a University like UC Berkley support a 55 million dollar budget cut just toward the Athletic Department? Their Athletic Department has over 30 sports, 300 employees, 850 athletes, and a budget of 100 million dollars a year. Making it very tough to just cancel everything.

Since the cancellation of the football season, to now the hope of playing being still alive, it still includes many challenges for Universities. Teams are still practicing; football, basketball, baseball and water polo are all practicing. But it’s not a normal practice. Before, during and after practice, athletes are required to do a temperature screening and all equipment that is being used is disinfected with machines that look like a ghost busters backpack. Making it seem like COVID can be detained for small periods of time during the day.

No University has dealt with a problem like this before, and nobody really knows the real answer of what college athletics should do. Colleges across the US are doing something different, but all together, each University is doing what they feel is the best solution.

The Audience in this article is focused towards college athletics fans or people involved with sports and how universities are going about the pandemic. This audience is a particularly big audience and could be seen by a large amount of people across the country.

I like the lead of the story, it gives a good sense of what’s actually going on across American Universities and it does tell a good informative story of how UC Berkley is doing.

This was a story on one university, it would have been interesting to ask another university and maybe compare how they were doing things different or the same. What could have been included in the article was maybe a few words from a coach, maybe see the point of view of what they are going through and what they think could be done differently.