Hockey East announced that its season will begin on Nov. 20 and feature a 20-game league schedule for the men and an 18-game league schedule for the women, with teams playing each opponent twice. There are also non-league games scheduled against league opponents (those games won’t count in the standings), which are being dubbed “flex weekends” and could be bumped if teams need to make up conference games that are impacted by COVID.
“We’ve built in what we’re calling flex weekends, but you can call them makeup weekends, where we’ve built in dates for every team where it gives us an opportunity to make up games on these weekends without conflict against conference games,” Hockey East commissioner Steve Metcalf, who is entering his first season on the job, said. “Hopefully we can have a situation where everyone has played a double round-robin. The flex weekends is the mechanism we have in place to make up the games that will undoubtedly get missed at some point.”
Metcalf said that teams have already had outbreaks, but he hopes the protocols in place give the league the best chance to move forward.
“Our goal is to get all of our teams through the double round-robin,” Metcalf said. “If we can play some additional games on top of that, it would be fabulous. We think our protocols that we have in place give ourselves the best chance. There is some optimism. I read the news, I see where the cases are and over the last week or two the numbers have risen. That makes our lives a little more difficult, but our institutions have been great partners. We have protocols in place that we think gives us the best chance (to complete the season). We are optimistic, but realistic.”
If a player or staff member does test positive, they would be removed for at least 10 days. But Metcalf said that Hockey East has a set protocol that could affect the rest of the team, with contact tracing taking place and tests administered to the rest of the affected program to determine whether or not it’s a more widespread problem within that particular team.
“There’s some degree of institutional prerogative, but essentially for 10 days an individual who tests positive would be unavailable,” he said. “It really depends on how widespread the positives tests are. Until you can retest and do contact tracing, there’s a lot of nuances and we don’t know how it will affect a whole team. I think we have a good vigorous protocol but we’re going to have issues, we know that. We just have to have great communication when we do have those issues and I have no reason to believe that won’t happen, because the communication has been great.”
Hockey East has taken some extra precautions as well. For instance, the schedules are linked up on the men’s and women’s side, meaning that if BC and Merrimack are playing a two-game weekend series on the men’s side, the women’s programs would also play the same weekend. That way, if there are positive tests that stem from either game, it has only affected two campuses as opposed to potentially four.
