When every freshman attends Boston College orientation, they first hear about the “BC Bubble.” Despite the university’s name, BC really isn’t in Boston—not like BU and Northeastern anyway. It’s in Chestnut Hill, and, as a result, it has a spacious college campus that offers students practically everything they could need, from dining halls to party spots. Many students stick within that 370+ acre environment and don’t bother drifting past Brighton and Newton.
Freshmen are warned about the constrictive effects of the BC Bubble and are encouraged to explore Boston and its neighboring cities. Now, however, the university is imploring that first-year students stay put. The same goes for the rest of school, including the student-athletes.
The BC Bubble has taken on a completely different meaning. And so far, it’s working.
As of Tuesday, the university had administered 20,028 COVID-19 tests for members of the BC community, with only 13 total positive cases (0.06% positivity rate). Of those 13 positives, 11 are undergraduates. That means that the undergrad student body has yielded a positivity rate of just 0.13%. To put that in perspective, UNC had a 13.6% positivity rate shortly before it sent its students home and moved the semester online, according to The Daily Tar Heel.
BC’s classes started on Monday, but its football team has been on campus since June 22. Since, the program has administered 1,501 COVID-19 tests to student-athletes, coaches, and staff members. Only one person has come back positive, and that was back in late June. Before long, that player recovered and rejoined team activities.
BC’s most recent round of COVID-19 testing saw all 106 participating student-athletes produce negative results. The Eagles’ players moved out of their 90 St. Thomas More eight-mans and into their respective dorms a couple weeks ago. They then watched the rest of the student body arrive on the Heights over the course of a seven-day period.
“When everybody was moving in, it was weird,” running back Travis Levy said after Tuesday’s practice. “Guys had anxiety, and another testament is we still have negative cases. … As a team, we’re locked in for the season, and we’re looking forward to playing.”
Hafley explained that, even though the team has repeatedly rattled off waves of testing with zero positive cases, it’s not exactly clockwork. He said that once students started to return to Chestnut Hill, the program had to hit the reset button.
“While we were in our own bubble, it became pretty easy to maybe put your mask down or not think about as much,” Hafley said. “Now, we’ve got to ramp it up. We’ve gotta really tighten up the protocols and hit the reset and realize that this is real, and, at any given moment, it could affect us. We have to keep that very, very strongly in the back of our minds.”
In addition to UNC, N.C. State also switched to online learning on Aug. 20 because of a spike of COVID-19 cases. Students at N.C. State were originally allowed to remain on campus, but after several clusters of coronavirus were identified in the university’s residence halls, students living on campus were told that they had to leave campus by Sept. 6, as reported by the Technician.
Notre Dame, on the other hand, tabled face-to-face learning for 15 days without sending its students home and experienced a drop in positivity rate through continued surveillance and diagnostic testing. The university is set to resume in-person classes on Wednesday and gradually restart other on-campus activities, according to the South Bend Tribune.
All three schools had to press pause on athletics because of COVID-19 complications. Hafley and his team are well aware of those stories. The 41-year-old head coach said that he uses examples—both good and bad—of other universities in the conference, as well as evidence from American professional sports leagues, to constantly remind the program of just how “real” the pandemic is, and how everything they’ve been working for can be abruptly interrupted.
COVID-19 didn’t throw a wrench in BC’s training camp. In fact, the Eagles only canceled one practice all summer, and that was out of solidarity following the Jacob Blake shooting.
“It speaks to the leadership here on campus,” Hafley said. From the president to the doctors to the training staff to everybody who manages any of our facilities, and then obviously our players. I mean it’s incredible.”
BC won’t kick off its season at Duke until Sept. 19, yet football is already in the air.
Eagles players posted up in their dorm rooms to watch Saturday night’s FCS opener between Central Arkansas (UCA) and Austin Peay. Levy recalls sitting in front of the TV and talking with his teammates about how they are “itching to play.” He said that the game was an indicator of what college football will look like this fall.
It wasn’t always pretty—cue the three turnovers, mishandled snaps, pooch punts, and, of course, a healthy dose of option pitches—but it was football (perhaps a mantra for the 2020 season).
Most importantly, it appears to have been safe, too, from a COVID-19 standpoint at least. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported on Monday that all 72 UCA players, coaches, and staff members who were tested two days after the game came back negative.
“It’s a sign of encouragement,” fifth-year linebacker Max Richardson said. “And it was good for us as roommates to sit down and watch some football being played, because it hasn’t happened in so long. There was a spotlight on that game just because we wanted to see, ‘Hey, football can happen.’ And just to have the first play be a touchdown. It was really exciting.”
