I am sure this is happening at a lot of colleges.
College football means big-time money to the universities and in some cases the state, so they don’t care if you die.
CSU football players and university athletic department staff say coaches have told players not to report COVID-19 symptoms, threatened players with reduced playing time if they quarantine and claim CSU is altering contact tracing reports to keep players practicing.
Said an athletic department staff member: “There are some red flags in the athletic department but the common denominator with this administration is to protect the coaches before the student-athletes and that makes them feel more like cattle than student-athletes.”
Players and athletic staff said they believed the pause should have happened a week earlier but that coach Steve Addazio was adamant to get practices in.
Players said trainers stress adhering to safety guidelines during training but compliance is difficult. They said they are suppose to wear face coverings during conditioning and practice drills but the masks make it hard to breathe so many players take them down. The players and staff said that makes spread of the disease inevitable.
“We had a player who definitely had coronavirus symptoms coughing at practice and he wasn’t wearing a mask and I was next to him, touching him and there was spit and sweat,” a player said. “I told him he needed to get tested but he really didn’t want to because then he would be out. The next day he is not at practice. (If he tested positive) he already had spread the virus. That’s why a lot of players don’t feel safe at football practice.”
I am not shocked by this, are you?
The fact that college players don’t get paid makes it doubly wrong.
Flip the page for more about how Coach Addazio wanted to play this season come hell or high water.