Arizona Athletic Director Dave Heeke had an interview with longtime Spanish announcer Francisco Romero and addressed how Covid-19 is impacting the Athletic Department.
"I think our athletic department is doing very well under just different circumstances like how to transition completely to working remotely,” Heeke said. “We’re an enterprise group that wants to be around people.
“We’re used to having our all of our student athletes together. We’re very interactive in all the things that we do and how we do them, so you know it’s certainly a different time, that’s for sure, and we’re trying to find our way through it.
“Hopefully, we continue to make plans and contingency plans on different ways to begin to restart and we’re excited about that, but it’s been quite amazing with our staff of over 270 people.
“From coaches to our athletic trainers to our strength and conditioning, but then to our internal activities, our compliance department, our business department, our marketing area, our ticket area, all of those folks trying to stay engaged and be prepared so that when we can turn it back on it will be different, but when we can go back to action, we’ll be ready to do that.”
The biggest focus right now is trying to get athletes back on campus as safely as possible.
“We have a team of, I want to say 40 or so different staff members, coaches, student-athletes, and University personnel just focused on re-entry for athletics,” Heeke said.
“As you can imagine, you know, how to re-enter staff, how we would handle testing, how we will handle re-entering students and athletes into our facilities, different protocols, all of that is being addressed by our team and putting plans in place, along with the university, obviously a very robust University re-entry team that we’re working very closely with across the campus on how to bring back 40,000 students and 15,000 employees.
“It’s quite an effort, but we’ve made a lot of progress. We already do have some, and we’ll talk more about that, but we have some limited staff and some student athletes on campus, working out right now.
“It’s a big, big project and again I go back to our staff and the effort that they put in, the miles they’ve put on the car so to speak during this time has been really incredible.”
It’s no surprise that the entire process has been exhausting considering that the result has […]