HONOLULU — The Big West Conference has seen its first week of intraleague basketball competition largely wiped out after multiple teams have gone on COVID-19 pauses, reflecting the perilous position inflicted on college hoops nationally from the surging omicron variant.
On the men’s basketball side, three of five matchups set for Thursday and Saturday had been canceled as of Wednesday evening. Four Big West men’s programs are known to have current COVID issues — Hawaii, UC Irvine, Cal Poly and UC Riverside.
The women’s hoops side was impacted even more dramatically, with four of five matchups nixed on both Thursday and Saturday. The Rainbow Wahine have not had any reported COVID cases, but their opponents, UC Davis and UC Riverside, both backed out.
When the Big West's 20-game conference schedule was constructed, there were no bye dates included. The canceled games will more than likely not be made up.
“This thing came on like a brushfire,” Big West commissioner Dan Butterly told Spectrum News in a phone interview Wednesday. “Ten days ago, two weeks ago, we saw something on the horizon. … It’s amazing how quickly this omicron variant spread.”
In the last week, the conference adjusted its policy so that games wiped out will not count as forfeits by the team going through COVID protocols, but instead will be judged no-contests. The league will go to a winning-percentage model to determine seeds for the Big West tournament in Las Vegas in March because of the likelihood of a variance in the number of games played from team to team.
“We were able to revert back to the 2020-21 tiebreaking procedures and some of those things we already had in place, just in case something like this would flare up,” Butterly said. “And it flared up a lot quicker than we thought.”
UH is now looking to open Big West play on Jan. 6 — at Cal State Fullerton for the Rainbow Warriors, and at home against Long Beach State for the Rainbow Wahine.
Coach Eran Ganot’s ‘Bows (4-5) have an unspecified number of players isolating in COVID protocols, a number that’s “gone up” in the last handful of days since their first player, Mate Colina, entered protocols prior to the Hawaiian Airlines Diamond Head Classic tournament. UH, which is fully vaccinated, saw its Christmas matchup with Northern Iowa get canceled because of its lack of available players.
Cal Poly was the latest Big West team to announce cancelations on Wednesday.
“You’ve seen several programs impacted every day, almost every hour,” Ganot said. “It’s been tough. Some of it is out of your control; you’re doing (precautions) to the best of your ability and you’re still getting hit. Our position’s been unique — 21 straight months of no positives, and this came.”
The silver lining, he said, is that omicron cases have typically not been as severe. Ganot said the team is now preparing to play next week but is cognizant of the fact that other pauses could occur from now until March.
“You figure out ways to stay ready and prepared with all of that going on,” Ganot said. “It’s a tough challenge.”
Coach Laura Beeman’s Rainbow Wahine (3-6) are in the process of returning to the Islands since their holiday road trip was cut short due to the cancellations.
“I think everyone’s hoping for (a scenario that) maybe the first (half) is a little screwy, and then as we get into the second half of conference it becomes a little more consistent, and at least teams play each other once before we head to the tournament,” Beeman said. “We’re going to have to talk to the NCAA about different minimums (in games played) in order to get that automatic (Big West berth to the NCAA tournament).”
She is in favor making the emergency conference schedule put into place last year — with teams pairing up by the week and playing two games against each other at the same site — the permanent format going forward. If not that, she favors a schedule with byes that doesn’t necessarily require all teams in the league to play each other twice every season.
“I was not a fan of this schedule in any way, shape or form,” Beeman said. “I was not a fan of two separate opponents per week, and I was not a fan of no byes. I lived that life with the (WNBA’s Los Angeles) Sparks when, every week you were playing different opponents. The toll it takes on players and coaches, you can feel it. I thought the level of competition was not as good as it should be.”
Butterly said that, because of teams’ existing travel plans for flights and hotels, this year’s schedule can’t be adjusted on the fly. But he said other models are being looked at for future years, starting with 2023-24 (the 2022-23 schedule is already essentially locked in, he said.)
“I’ve put together a couple models for membership to look at for 2023-24 that would add another week to the schedule and potentially provide a little bit of breathing room for teams to get a little bit more competitive balance in the schedule,” Butterly said.
