All University of Portland fall sports will be postponed until spring 2021 as part of the West Coast Conference’s announcement Thursday.
“We empathize with our student-athletes,” West Coast Conference Commissioner Gloria Nevarez said in a news release. “This is a difficult decision, but it is the responsible decision based on the available information associated with conducting competition in the current environment. WCC programs compete for national titles and we never want to take these opportunities away. However, health and safety will always be paramount in guiding our decisions. We must ensure our student-athletes have a safe environment to compete and meet the NCAA’s guidelines for Resocialization of Collegiate Sport, along with current federal, state and local health and safety measures in place at each member institution.”
For the Pilots, the affected fall sports are men’s and women’s soccer, women’s volleyball, and men’s and women’s cross country.
The postponement does not currently include men’s and women’s basketball games scheduled to be played in the fall.
“We are committed to providing the safeguards to conduct a men’s and women’s basketball season this winter,” Nevarez said in the release. “We want to get back to celebrating the tremendous achievements of our programs as soon as we can, but we must first ensure we can compete in a safe manner.”
The West Coast Conference will allow its member schools to play nonconference games if the schools believe it is safe to do so. It is unclear at this time if Portland plans to schedule nonconference games for this fall.
“This decision is unequivocally the right one as there was no path forward to start seasons in a safe manner on September 24,” Portland Vice President for Athletics Scott Leykam said in a statement. “Here at Portland we have implemented many advanced safety measures to ensure student-athletes and staff on campus can train in the safest environment possible and we will continue to follow NCAA and WCC guidelines in this regard options going forward.”
With the West Coast Conference’s postponement, there will be no Division I college sports in Oregon this fall as it stands now. The Pac-12 and Big Sky conferences had already postponed their seasons — the Big Sky having done so earlier Thursday morning. Until this West Coast Conference’s announcement, Portland was the last remaining school that hadn’t postponed.
The Pac-12 and Big Sky did not allow for teams to play nonconference games, whereas the West Coast Conference did.
-- Matt Cohen, mcohen@oregonian.com