BREAKING: MAAC Cancels Fall Sports

Will Fowler
July 27, 2020

It’s been 137 days since Siena and Fairfield walked off the court after their MAAC women’s basketball quarterfinal. 137 days since both the basketball tournaments and spring season were cancelled. 137 days since we saw any kind MAAC competition.

Today, we found out that the wait will extend even longer.

In an official statement from the league office and Council of Presidents, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference has officially cancelled its season for the fall of 2020.

“Following today’s Council of Presidents meeting, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) has decided to cancel fall sports competition due to continuing health and safety concerns surrounding the global COVID-19 pandemic,” read the release.

The decision comes days after a separate Council of Presidents meeting, during which another official statement was released declaring that non-conference play for volleyball, men’s soccer and women’s soccer would be cancelled and the championship weekends moved. Since that announcement, several conferences, from Division I to Division III, took the definitive action to cancel fall competition, further plunging the state of the MAAC’s fall season into question.

That speculation became fact on Monday, as the MAAC became just the fifth Division I conference in the nation to cancel its fall season. It follows the Ivy League, Patriot League, MEAC and SWAC.

The decision means that there will be no men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross country, or women’s volleyball on the Quinnipiac campus come August, nor will there be a season for “sports that conduct non-traditional season segments in the fall”, which includes men’s and women’s tennis and women’s golf.

Because of its associate membership with the Big East, women’s field hockey remains in action for the time being. It will not play a non-conference schedule and will play conference games using a “divisional double-round robin”, which splits the conference into two divisions and has each team play everyone else in the division twice.

While the fall season has been cancelled, there remains a chance that the championships involved will be rescheduled for the spring. Other Division I conferences have already announced that this idea is being explored, and some Division III schools and conferences, such as the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference and the American Southwest Conference, have already announced that as the anticipated plan.

The MAAC Executive Committee will explore with the Committee on Athletic Administration (COAA) the goal of providing the student-athletes with a schedule of contests among conference members in the spring of 2021 in accordance with each institution’s procedures and applicable state regulations,” MAAC Commissioner Rich Ensor states in the release. “It is the goal of the MAAC to ensure it recognizes a MAAC champion in each sport and it will review possible championship formats for the fall sports in accordance with evolving state and local regulations.”

It’s been 137 days since we’ve seen live action in the MAAC. It appears our wait will extend into the cold months of winter.