Assuming the UNBC Timberwolves four varsity sports teams begin the new season this fall, the U Sports Canada West Conference landscape will be radically different.
Canada West athletic directors have drawn up tentative schedules that will mean shortened seasons, later start dates and reduced travel to cut costs for teams in all of the conference’s sports.
For UNBC soccer, the men’s and women’s teams will play a 10-game season, all within the borders of B.C. The basketball season has been shortened from 20 to 16 games.
“Canada West put a lot of thought into this whole process,”’ said UNBC athletics and recreation director Loralyn Murdoch. “The student athlete came first, the institutions’ financial situations were taken into account, and we moved forward with making regional schedules in hopes that we can have schedules, which are very much up in the air right now.”
COVID-19 restrictions now in effect until Sept. 1 limit coaches to working with no more than seven athletes on the field at one time. The tentative start of the season has been pushed back a few weeks to the Sept. 18-20 weekend, with training camps not to begin before Sept. 1. The start dates are subject to change and the conference has yet to finalize its playoff format, which will be announced in June.
“It’s all very much dependent on what goes on with the provincial health organization and how the province starts to open up,” said Murdoch. “All we can really hope for is the province opens up in a safe manner and we can get going.”
All B.C. postsecondary schools have announced they will be offering mixed-blend instruction with some in-class teaching and the majority of lectures remotely delivered online. Murdoch said if social distancing measures remain effect for the start of classes the T-wolves teams have to be cognizant of respecting provincial guidelines in their team activities and housing arrangements.
“If we are not allowed to be within two metres of someone, we can’t play soccer or basketball,” Murdoch said. “But we can still train. There’s many modifications the coaches are working on to get the kids back training where they don’t have to be within two metres of each other and still have high-performance training.”
In soccer, the UNBC men will play in a seven-team Pacific Division while the other six Canada West teams in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba will make up the Prairie Division. The four games the T-wolves usually play against non-divisional opponents have been scrapped. Last season the T-wolves men played 15 games (4-8-3, seventh place, missed playoffs), while the women played 14 games (3-7-4, sixth place, made playoffs).
The T-wolves women’s soccer team will also be part of a seven-team B.C. Division, and will compete for the conference title with a five-team Alberta Division and four-team Saskatchewan/Manitoba Division UNBC had four divisional crossover games last year and played the Calgary Dinos twice when they were part of the former Pacific Division. Calgary has since been moved to the Alberta Division.
The UNBC women have a veteran-stacked roster with two fifth-year players (Paige Payne, Mara McCleary) and nine fourth-year veterans, including top-10 Canada West scorer Sofia Jones. After making the playoffs for the second time in three seasons last year the T-wolves are optimistic they can field the strongest team since UNBC became a Canada West member school in 2012.
Head coach Neil Sedgwick says his players continue to train on their own and they post their instructional workout drills daily on Twitter. While there is no certainty there will be a 2020 season, the T-wolves are preparing to put their game-faces on by mid-September.
“Things are changing and they continue to change pretty fast,” said Sedgwick. “What we know now may be completely different from what we’ll know two weeks from now or a month from now, and we’ll just wait and see.
“As soon as we hit Sept. 1 we can continue as a team again but training in August would be groups of seven. We’re planning how we do positional training so once we hit Sept. 1 all the small pieces will fit nicely together, and that’s the challenge for our coaching team, to try to piece that together. We still have a few months before we were even meant to report, if all conditions were normal.”
While there are border restrictions in place which require 14-day quarantines upon entering Canada, Jones is the only international student on the UNBC women’s soccer team and Sedgwick said she plans to spend the summer in Prince George.
The team had one of its spring tournaments canceled by COVID but the T-wolves played four games in Vancouver in early March, which gave Sedgwick a chance to see his first-year players in action.
“It’s a strong squad and we’ll have good numbers, I think we’ll be at 32 players this year with four goalkeepers,” he said.
Canada West basketball has switched from a single-division format into three divisions (B.C., Alberta, and Saskatchewan/Manitoba. The UNBC women’s and men’s basketball teams will play all their games within a seven-team BC Division.
In 2019-20, the UNBC women went 11-9 to finish ninth and advanced to the second round of playoffs. The T-wolves men missed the playoffs after posting a 6-14 record to place 14th.
U Sports has yet to determine if there will be national championships in its seven varsity sports and if there are none, Murdoch said each Canada West team has the ability to withdraw from the league without penalty to save a year of eligibility for the athletes.
The six Canada West football teams will be among the first to be affected by the shortened season and each team will play five games instead of the usual eight. U Sports hockey (men’s and women’s) has nine Canada West member schools with Lethbridge canceling its program and the addition of Trinty Western and MacEwan. The season has been cut from 28 games to 20. Each team will play each other twice with two other games against regional opponents.
The five women’s rugby teams will play four-game seasons, while three women’s field hockey teams will each play eight games. Track and field, cross country (running), swimming, golf and curling and wrestling, the “championship sports” of Canada West, will go ahead as scheduled in 2020-21.
The regular-season formats for all sports now in place will be revisited next year.
