Orange County NC Website
DocuSign Envelope ID:502009F3-4D5D-4553-94B6-17FCBFF12415 <br /> We brought our staff back June 1, 2020. A few weeks later, we started slowly bringing back our <br /> student athletes. We brought our fall sports back first and then we brought all our sports teams back. <br /> Then we started thinking about how we could have competitions during a pandemic. Firstly, how do we <br /> do it safely with our participants: the coaches,the players, the officials? Then, how do we do it with <br /> fans? We used to try to cram as many people in to every space that we possibly could. Now we had to <br /> think about how we keep people seated six feet apart. How do we make it easy for them to sanitize <br /> their hands? How do we disinfect our facilities as frequently as we have to? <br /> The first football game we had 25 people,the parents of senior players. By the second football <br /> game,we were able to go up to about 3,500 fans. Most of the basketball season,the only people we <br /> could have there were the parents of our players. The last two games we were able to go up to about <br /> 4,000 fans in Smith Center. Therefore, when we played Florida State and Duke we were able to have <br /> 4,000 fans there. We had our last home baseball game last night. We will host one more event on <br /> campus,this Saturday, our women's lacrosse team will play in the NCAA quarterfinal. The NCAA rule is <br /> still at a 50%cap. Therefore, we will have up to about 2,000 people there. Then we will start planning <br /> for the fall. We are very, very hopeful, obviously,for full capacity stadiums. We are budgeting at 60% <br /> capacity, we are hoping for at least 80%capacity and we are prepared for 100%capacity this fall. <br /> The other final COVID-related topic I will touch on is the NCAA instituted a "COVID dead period" <br /> for recruiting. That means recruits cannot meet with us and our coaches are not allowed to meet with <br /> recruits. That ends June 1. So imagine for 14 months, no high school athletes have been able to visit <br /> universities. That is all changing June 1. There is so much pent-up demand and pent-up energy for <br /> student athletes to get out and visit universities. So we are making sure that we are ready to do that <br /> and host those folks as safely as we possibly can. We have student athletes that have signed to play at <br /> Carolina or have committed to play at Carolina or have an offer and are very interested, they have never <br /> even met our coach, and coaches have not met them. So starting June 1, we will start welcoming folks <br /> back to campus for summer camps where they actually participate in the sport and then official and <br /> unofficial visits. <br /> It has been a great year for us in terms of communication and collaboration. It has also been a <br /> good year in terms of results. We have had our highest GPAs ever across the athletics department and <br /> within individual sport programs. We had a football team meeting last night in which we celebrated the <br /> team's total GPA for the most recent semester was almost a 3.2. So we are really proud of how our <br /> student athletes are doing in the classroom. <br /> What they are doing in competition has been amazing. We have already won three national <br /> championships this year. We won both the men's and women's tennis indoor national championship. <br /> Karen Shelton won her ninth field hockey championship. That is fifty-five total team championships now <br /> for our department. We could win four more this spring. Women's tennis plays Duke tonight and if <br /> they beat Duke,we will be in the women's tennis final four. Men's lacrosse is the number one seat in <br /> the NCAA tournament. That game for the national championship, if they play in it, will be May 31. <br /> Women's lacrosse is the number one seat by far in the NCAA tournament. If they get to the national <br /> championship game,that game will be on May 30. We also have our men's golf team and our baseball <br /> team that still have a chance. <br /> The COVID impact on us financially has been huge. We are very much focused now on how we <br /> emerge from this in a financially responsible way but also in a way that allows us to continue to do what <br /> we do. If you look at the Power Five universities,the 65 highest-level universities in the country,there <br /> are only five schools that sponsor as many sports as we do. We have 20 teams and we have a high level <br /> 3 1 P a g e CHOCVB BOD Meeting May 19 , 2021 <br />