The Fall sports season is usually a time where athletic events are happening night in and night out. Tyler Godwin, who is the graduate assistant in sports information for Waynesburg University, works almost every sporting event, hastily trying to keep up with game statistics, updating the Jacket website, and many other tasks.

A season without sports, however, has made Godwin’s job somewhat more relaxed and slower-paced.

The sports information department has been finding numerous ways to keep sports relevant until their planned return in the Spring. Even though sports are currently non-existent in the PAC, the amount that they will have in the Spring could be challenging according to Godwin.

 

Q: Are sports most likely coming back?

A: “The fact that they have already come out with some preliminary fall sports schedules in the spring, that makes me feel more confident that we are moving towards that. I’m hoping within the next month or so we’re going to have a little bit more of a direct ‘here’s the plan’ type thing, but I do feel confident about it. We are seeing with Division I Athletics that are still competing right now, we’re not seeing a lot of outbreaks. It seems like schools are doing a good job following the protocols and making sure that they are not letting anything get too out of hand. I’m hoping that some of the lower divisions, like Division III, are kind of seeing how other bigger schools that are still operating right now are handling their business. We can apply that and take off those of those precautions as well.”

Q: What does the Spring look like generally in terms of your department with all of the sports coming back?

A: “It is going to be a little crazy. It’s looking a lot like we are going to have about every sport competing over those four or five months between January and May.”

“All the sports whenever the spring and winter schedules do come out, they’re going to be operating kind of around each other simultaneously. We might have weeks where we have five different sports competing.”

Q: What have you been doing during the Fall to help prepare for a load of Spring sports next semester?

A: “We’ve been doing a lot of historical research and record-keeping just to get those updated as best we can and do some work on the website to get that looking a little better. We’ve been trying to think of ideas to keep Waynesburg sports active on social media sites. We went back and did ‘This Day in History’ for all the fall sports, so we’ve been releasing that on different social media platforms for football, men’s and women’s soccer, [and] cross country.”

“In terms of prepping for fall sports in the spring, we have the perspective schedules for each sport, so we’ve got those online and we’ve been talking to the coaches to figure out how we’re going to plan the operations whenever we get there.”

Q: How is limiting staff members into an arena/stadium going to affect your work?

A: “We typically do have Bobby [Fox] and myself, and then we’ll have oftentimes somewhere between three to five student workers also helping us out. With University guidelines and maybe even conference guidelines, I’m not sure if we are not going to be allowed to be close per social distancing guidelines. Especially the stat keeping part, usually we have two people doing that and they have to be right next to each other to make sure that we are getting the stats correct. We [may] have to limit that to one person. Everyone’s going to have to be creative.”