NOTE: This article originally appeared in The Fordham Ram in December 2020.
The haphazard start of the college basketball season continued this week, as both the Fordham men’s and women’s basketball teams had games canceled due to COVID-19.
On the women’s side, the Rams were scheduled to take on Manhattan on Dec. 2. However, the Jaspers had a positive COVID-19 test among its Tier 1 (players, coaches, staff) personnel last week, forcing the team into quarantine and the game into cancelation.
Fordham is coming off of an impressive season-opening win over Stony Brook, a team that won 28 games a season ago. Sophomore guard Anna DeWolfe led all scorers with 25 points. Junior forward Kaitlyn Downey scored 16 points and added a career-high 20 rebounds — for her effort on both ends of the floor, Downey was named the Atlantic 10’s player of the week. The team is scheduled to visit Quinnipiac on Saturday in a matchup of two teams that made the NCAA Tournament in 2019.
This is a season unlike any other in college basketball. As of Tuesday morning, 35 men’s basketball programs were shut down due to a positive COVID-19 test. As teams continue to travel for games and the coronavirus spread continues to explode throughout the country, more games will be shut down as teams deal with possible outbreaks.
The Fordham women’s basketball team knew this was a possibility entering the season.
“You’re expecting to play a team the next day, and all of a sudden, it gets taken away just like that,” Downey said before the season. “So just understanding that there’s going to be a lot of errors in this season and just being ready to take the punches and keep moving on, because we know at the end of the day, we want to win an A-10 championship, and it’s going to take just moving through all those punches, winning the games that we have available to us and just moving forward.”
Fordham’s conference schedule begins on Dec. 21 against Davidson. The team hopes it can get a few more opportunities to fine-tune before then.