Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

UNLV basketball sends players home for rest of summer

T.J. Otzelberger introduced at UNLV

Steve Marcus

T.J. Otzelberger, UNLV’s new men’s basketball head coach responds to a question during a news conference at the Thomas & Mack Center Thursday, March 28, 2019.

UNLV basketball has canceled the rest of its on-campus summer workouts and sent its players home, likely until September.

Coach T.J. Otzelberger made the decision over the weekend and the roster has since dispersed to their respective hometowns, with the exception of the team’s two foreign players, Mbacke Diong (Senegal) and Edoardo Del Cadia (Italy).

The NCAA allows teams to practice together for eight hours a week for eight weeks during the summer. That window was pushed back this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but eventually started on July 20. UNLV had full participation during the last two weeks.

Otzelberger liked what he saw during the workouts and expressed confidence in the program’s ability to handle COVID-19 concerns from a health and safety standpoint, but said he didn’t want a potentially warped 2020-21 schedule to negatively impact his team.

If COVID-19 protocols are in place throughout the season it would become difficult for players to leave campus to visit home without undergoing long quarantine periods upon returning to UNLV.

“It's important, especially at a time like this, that they be able to spend some time with their families, and I didn’t know when they would be able to go home next,” Otzelberger said. “There could be a chance they can’t go home at Christmas because it’s a two-week quarantine. That would be tough on players to keep them here for so long without any kind of break.”

Otzelberger didn’t say when he would bring players back to campus, but according to NCAA rules, teams are allowed to begin full practices 42 days before the first game of the season. For UNLV, that would put the first official practice in late September. In order to participate then, players would have to return to campus early and quarantine for two weeks before being allowed on the court with their teammates.

That’s only if the season begins on time, of course. There are some who believe the start date could be pushed back, possibly to 2021, in an attempt to cut down on non-conference travel.

Otzelberger doesn’t want his players isolated on campus for such an extended period without knowing when the real games will begin.

“There’s so much uncertainty,” Otzelberger said. “We might not start a season until January. We don’t want to be in a spot where we’ve kept [the players] here for three months, and then we start practice. I’m big into pacing the team for the season and making sure they’re playing their best at the end. If we kept them here from June all the way through the season, there’s no way we’re playing our best basketball in February and March.”

Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.

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