ANTHONY GETTINO
Assistant Sports Editor
“You don’t get into a profession for the awful days. You get into it for the good days, the camaraderie. We’ve just gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other through the hard days in hopes we get back to those types of days.”
This is what Jerry Fisk had to say about the situation that we currently find ourselves in, especially the Athletics Department.
Jerry Fisk is the Director of Athletics at SUNY Fredonia. Like most of us, he has had to make some unfathomable choices since COVID-19 began to spread throughout the U.S. in March.
He also didn’t have a say in some decisions that he was then told to enforce on our school’s department.
“There were a number of uncomfortable decisions, but many of them were made by other entities, like the NCAA deciding that there are no fall championships. I have to relay that, some of those were really hard.
“Personnel decisions we had to make were really hard… I love the sport of it, but we invest in each other personally, pieces that affect that are really tough. We value each other if you’re doing things right. The NCAA made a lot of the decisions for us; any of the decisions were uncomfortable.”
When asked if there was a decision that was harder than others, Fisk said, “Obviously letting all the spring teams know that the season was cancelled — that was not the highlight of my career. It was pretty brutal to break hearts and tell people [that] their season was cancelled, and have to spring it on them the way that we had to.
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“As fast as decisions were made in March, it went from: ‘things are fine,’ to ‘we need to take a two week break,’ in 36 to 48 hours.”
After he told athletes that they wouldn’t be playing the spring season, which for some, was their last chance of competing at the collegiate level, Fisk got to work almost immediately to try and make it so that Fredonia would be prepared for any outcome for the fall season that was approaching.
“We started looking forward earnestly at the conference level in mid-April. I put together a weekly video chat with the other ADs in the SUNYAC conference, and we’ve been doing those every Monday or every other Monday since the beginning of April,” said Fisk.
“We put together the COVID task force within athletics at Fredonia in late May, and we started meeting weekly or biweekly on Wednesdays. [We put in] literally hundreds of hours of strategizing, planning and trying things out so we could have success, protect people and do things in a responsible manner.”
These different protocols may not have saved Fredonia’s fall sports seasons, as in late July, the NCAA cancelled fall championships.
But these plans that were put in place are allowing the school to still let these teams practice with each other, which is more than what most schools are able to do.
However, being able to stay on campus and to actually practice these sports requires everyone to do their part.
“I think it’s hard. Do I think we did well considering? Yeah,” said Fisk.
“There’s no playbook for this; there’s no one who’s ever seen this before… not to take any of the blame and put it onto the school or another department, but the success of these plans all ultimately comes down to the accountability of 18 to 22-year-olds. We can put the best plan in place, but the way that I would implement it as a 40-something-year-old and the way a 19-year-old [would] are going to be really different.”
Fisk was open about how these challenges are hard for everyone, including himself, saying, “As much as I missed all the student athletes and coaches in the spring, that you all missed each other the same way. And so, it’s hard not to get back together with people to catch up and things like that, and I understand it. It’s been very dissatisfying saying ‘hi’ to people socially-distanced with masks on over phone calls, when I’m the type of guy [who] wants to get together and ask you how you’ve been doing, how’s your summer been, how’s this, how’s that, because that’s why we do this. We love the sport, [and] the sport facilitates personal interaction which is a lot of what we thrive on, so I get how it’s hard.”
Fredonia’s athletic department didn’t suffer as badly as some other schools in the NCAA that rely on the revenue from football and basketball seasons to pay for the rest of their sports teams, like the University of Minnesota.
The budget for the athletic department was cut by around 20-25 percent, according to Fisk.
“Most of our fees… are used [for] travel, and meals and hotels for competition. But when we don’t need to send people to different locations for their next competition, we don’t have some of those expenses, so that’s sort of worked out.”
The cancellation of March Madness, however, did impact the athletic department.
They used that money to have guest speakers come talk to teams and send SAAC representatives to conferences around the state.
Even with all of these challenges, no one decided to give up throughout Fredonia or the SUNYAC.
“I’m lucky to work in my department… under Dr. [Cedric] Howard and with my peers across the SUNYAC. There has been a tremendous amount of collaboration to create the playbook in how to deal with this thing that we’ve never dealt with before. That’s one of the things that’s really stuck with me.”
“I appreciate all the student athletes as well as other students that are making sacrifices, because I’m as ready as anybody out there to get past this and get back to… rooting you all on at practice and competition and everything else,” Fisk said.