ASHEVILLE – The city of Asheville can be a bubble for school basketball e-year, according to Asheville Buncombe Regional Sports Commission President Demp Bradford.
Bradford told the Citizen Times on September 3 that his organization along with Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville and UNC Asheville “to explore opportunities to create a bubble in Asheville” that can come with men’s and women’s convention games for the Big South and Southern conventions, as well as unconventional regional games that can come with the Atlantic Coast Conference.
The bubble would create a remote domain that would prevent athletes and staff from contracting COVID-19 during the game.
“Asheville has a culture of harboring exciting school basketball,” Bradford said in an email to the Citizen Times.”Asheville has hosted 21 South Conference basketball tournaments since 1983 and we look forward to a long relationship with them.”
Bradford said a medical advisory committee had been formed to navigate the protection of a potential NCAA school basketball bubble in Asheville, and said initial plans were for fans not to attend games.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll have a bubble, ” said Bradford.”But no one will know anything until September 16, when the NCAA makes a decision about the start date of the season.Asheville will seek to recruit quality athletes”.occasions for our network and safely for all participants and our network..”
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the NCAA to explore new tactics for a season in 2020.The NBA bubble concept proved a success, and NCAA President Mark Emmert recently announced to ESPN’s Andy Katz his plans for winter and spring sports.
“In men’s and women’s basketball, we have to do what we have to do,” Emmert said.”We communicate fairly consistently with our media components on flexibility.We would love to keep the existing dates. The virus will be a vital component of this.”We’re looking for alternatives. The same thing happened with the last sleep in the spring.We played baseball at school on a normal basis until June.We played softball late in the year the classes ended.We can take a look at the dates and push them back.It’s basically time for logistics, physical care and the media.These are not insurmountable problems.”
This story will be updated
David Thompson is an award-winning Citizen Times.You can contact him [email protected] at 828-231-1747 or on Twitter at @acthshuddle.