Photo Courtesy of Morgan Maccione.
Bi-weekly Covid-19 testing has become a religious part of Conn’s campus life. Go to the testing center for your appointment within a half an hour of the time you scheduled it, swab each one of your nostrils three times, put your sample in the bin, and be on your merry way. With testing as regular a part of campus life as classes, one could wonder if having the Testing Center in the Athletics Center, far away from the dorms and across CT-32 is really the best place for it. Although it gives everyone a good excuse to get outside and go for a walk amidst an onslaught of virtual classes, maneuvering through the sporadically foul East Coast weather to the testing location often feels more like a hike.
Thankfully, the weather is beginning to warm up. Large snow piles that once kept cars trapped in parking lots are beginning to melt and icy patches on sloped sidewalks are thawing out.
However, with weather including rain, snow, and below-freezing temperatures still ahead in the forecast, it is worth wondering if it would be better to have had the Testing Center in a more central location.
When deciding which facility to use for the Testing Center, Dean Cardwell, Senior Associate Dean of Student Life, and staff, collaborated with Hartford HealthCare to make this decision. They decided that the most important attributes of a safe testing center were its accessibility to students and its ventilation, especially its ability to be properly ventilated in the cold months of winter. What was also important in the decision to use the wood basketball court was its isolated location and sole purpose of being a testing center.
By having an isolated location like the wooden gym, faculty could be sure that students wouldn’t be passing through at random. If a facility like the 1962 room had been used, there would have been students passing through for all sorts of reasons while others were being tested. This would have caused problems by threatening the unnecessary spread of COVID-19 as well as for contact tracing purposes.
There is an exception, though, to the notion that the basketball court isn’t being used for any other reason than COVID-19 testing. Recently, as the campus has again seen success managing the spread of the virus, athletic teams have begun practicing again. Three Conn varsity teams, the Women’s Volleyball, the Women’s Basketball, and the Men’s Basketball have begun using the wooden gym for their practices.
The wooden gym, which includes two basketball courts, one used for the Testing Center and the other used for athletic practices, is divided by a stack of bleachers and curtained barriers. COVID-19, aside from being spread through the air, can also be spread by touching contaminated surfaces hours and even days after it was first contaminated by someone contagious with the disease.
One of the teams to use the wooden gym, Women’s Varsity Volleyball, has been practicing in the wooden gymnasium all year, as they usually would. When the school decided to move the Testing Center from the ice rink to the wooden basketball court it took many girls on the volleyball team by surprise, raising questions of whether their safety was going to be compromised.
In volleyball, to score a point and ultimately win, the ball needs to hit the floor on the opponent’s side of the court. In order to prevent this from happening, volleyball players engage in common acts to keep the ball in the air, before returning it over the net to their opponent’s side of the court. What often results from this effort is players ending up on the floor following their dives and digs to keep the ball alive.
The Women’s Volleyball team also couldn’t move to practice in the neighboring blue basketball gym, as other teams had, because the rubber floor surface would be harmful to the players when they engaged in the common volleyball acts mentioned previously.
What was once a tense situation, however, has now calmed down. The school has been very transparent in its communication with the volleyball team. They have made sure that the team is aware that they are taking every necessary precaution to ensure that not just the volleyball team is safe, but everybody who passes through the wooden basketball gym on a regular basis is, too.
With all this newfound security, a new question arose. If the gym is so safe, why can’t Conn host home athletic contests in it? This season, all of Conn’s games that would have been taking place in the wood gym have been scheduled as away contests.
Josh Edmed, the Women’s Volleyball Coach and Associate Director of Athletics, said Conn’s “inability to host (basketball or volleyball) is not a reflection of the Testing Center in terms of its operations and proximity. It is a reflection of the space required to host a competition.”
While slightly disappointing that we can’t cheer on our Camels in person, it’s just another sacrifice that members of the student body have so selflessly made to continue to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 on campus and elsewhere.
While it would have been nice to have had a more central testing location on the dormitory and classroom side of CT-32, having the Testing Center down by the athletics center has many silver linings. The view of the Thames River as you walk down the stairs from the bridge, the properly sized parking lot to fit Conn’s large population of student vehicles to make for easy transportation to the testing center, and most importantly everybody’s safety should make our entire community grateful to go to a school so committed to its students well being.
Go Camels!
