The global outbreak of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic that began in Wuhan China and has since spread world-wide has killed over 30,000 people so far, thus causing all sports and everything else in world-wide societies to be shut down for the foreseeable future. It has led to mass hysteria and chaos among people all over the world.
Due to the super contagious and rapidly spreading nature of this respiratory virus, families are being forced to stay at home and all non-essential businesses and education institutions have been shut down. My mom’s job as well as my sister’s and my colleges are currently operating via remote meetings and learning as a result.
In addition, this time of the year is normally one of the most exciting times for sports fans in the US and elsewhere. The NBA (National Basketball Association) and NHL (National Hockey League) are usually finishing up their regular seasons around this time and professional baseball players are beginning their anticipated new seasons in America, Korea, and Japan. The English Premier League Soccer and American professional soccer is also often in-season now. Unfortunately, due to the deadly nature of the virus, all these professional sports leagues seasons have been postponed with no imminent plan for how and when they will restart.
Amateur athletes are also getting affected by Covid-19. Since the 1940’s, The NCAA men’s and women’s basketball championship is played every year in the month of March which is where the phrase “March Madness” comes from. It has become a tradition for college basketball fans around the US to fill out their bracket predictions that are always never completely right due to the NCAA tournament’s propensity for upsets often featuring small-schools like Loyola-Chigago beating the more well-known schools such as Duke and Kentucky. Due to the unfortunate circumstances that this pandemic has created, this year’s tournament was cancelled for the first time since 1939, robbing teams like Dayton who were wanting to continue their miracle season. Not only that, but all collegiate athlethic conferences cancelled all spring sports, ending the seasons of baseball, softball and track athlethes abruptly. Spring athlethes may have a lifeline though as the NCAA is considering whether to offer an extra year of eligiblity to spring athlethes whose seasons were affected by coronavirus. Both Division I and II athlethes have already been granted an extra year of eligibility.
The summer Olympics were supposed to happen in Tokyo later this year, but in the past week or so, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) agreed to postpone the global games exactly a year in hopes that the coronavirus will go away by then.
