Winthrop, still navigating COVID issues, starting new season in surprise game tonight
A version of the Winthrop men’s basketball team will open its season in Louisville on Tuesday night.
The Winthrop athletic department announced first via Twitter Tuesday morning that the Eagles will open their season against UNC-Greensboro at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday in the Wade Houston Tipoff Classic. The team from Rock Hill was supposed to play UNCG on Sunday night in the Louisville event, but issues related to COVID-19 postponed the game.
The game’s prospects were revived, however, after it was announced that Prairie View A&M, the team that was originally supposed to play UNCG on Tuesday, would not participate in its remaining two games in the event in Louisville. (Per a release from UNCG, Prairie View A&M’s originally scheduled games have been canceled.)
This left an opening for Winthrop to play UNCG Tuesday night.
What were the COVID issues that postponed the first Winthrop-UNCG game on Sunday night?
Winthrop will be without two “Tier 1 personnel” associated with the men’s basketball team — players, managers, coaches and staff — on Tuesday night, Winthrop athletic director Ken Halpin confirmed with The Herald Tuesday morning.
One of those individuals received multiple positive coronavirus tests after the team had arrived in Louisville — one on Sunday and another on Monday, Halpin said. The other individual was deemed a high risk for COVID exposure after the team went through the event’s contact tracing procedure.
Halpin detailed the many precautions the team took to ensure that if something unexpected like this happened, Winthrop could still field a team in Louisville.
“This trip, we took two buses,” Halpin told The Herald in a phone interview Monday, before the UNCG game was rescheduled. “Nobody sat close to each other on the buses. We were masked the entire time.”
Halpin added that the contact tracing could have quarantined everyone if the team wasn’t careful, but it didn’t because the team took the necessary COVID precautions.
It’s worth mentioning that just over two weeks ago, Winthrop had to halt its basketball activities entirely after multiple coronavirus cases were identified in the program. That said, everyone in the Winthrop group that was traveling to Louisville delivered negative antigen and PCR (nasal swab) test results on Nov. 23, Nov. 25 and Nov. 27, Halpin said.
How does this affect the rest of Winthrop’s stay in Louisville?
Winthrop will now play Little Rock on Thursday at 4 p.m. and is still scheduled to take on Duquesne on Friday at 11 a.m., according to a release from Winthrop.
All of the remaining games for the Eagles will air live on ESPN3.
This story was originally published December 1, 2020 at 11:37 AM.
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