Commissioner talks tourney end

LAS VEGAS – WAC commissioner Jeff Hurd met with the media Thursday afternoon at Orleans Arena after the conference's decision to cancel the WAC Basketball Tournament and suspend spring sports competition.

Here is a transcript of his comments:

Opening statement:

I don't think any of us anticipated being here 24 hours ago or 48 hours ago when we all got here. Obviously, what's happened is unprecedented. It's unchartered waters for everybody. How we got here today began probably last week but really began last night and led to a decision we made today to cancel the remainder of the men's and women's WAC Basketball Tournament. In addition to that, our Board of Directors earlier this morning voted to suspend all spring conference sports and championships for an indefinite period of time, pending further information.

Q. How difficult was it to cancel this basketball tournament?

A. I don't think anybody want to cancel the tournament. In a perfect world scenario, you want to play and you want to play for a lot of reasons, in particularly the student-athletes that are playing the game. But for that reason also, the decision to cancel really wasn't a difficult decision. It was one where there really wasn't another decision to make. I think you have to look at the total picture. Our efforts and our decision and our discussion this morning was based solely on what's best for the student-athletes involved, both short-term and long-term. That made the decision fairly easy.

Q. Can you confirm the report of a WAC student-athlete going to the hospital and being tested negative for COVID-19?

A. Let me correct something here. You couldn't take somebody to a hospital last night, test them for COVID-19 and have a result back that quickly. It just doesn't happen that way. But to answer your question, that certainly was part of our process. I think it's more accurate to say there was no indication at all for the individual involved that there was any Coronavirus indication for that particularly individual. That certainly was a relief, no question about that.

Q. How much revenue does the conference stand to lose by this cancellation here?

A. I couldn't even being to tell you. Again, that's one of those things that will take some time. There's a number of issues with it. That's not just ticket refunds or ticket sales. It has to do with sponsorships and other things. We just simply haven't had the time. And quite frankly, that wasn't even a concern as we made the decision. It wasn't something that factored into it, whether it was huge loss of money or no loss.

Q. Was there something that transpired internally Thursday night that triggered this shutdown?

A. Well, obviously, we canceled the (GCU-CSU Bakersfield women's) game last night. That was the trigger to this morning's discussion. I will say that when we went into our meeting this morning, I didn't know at that time what was going to the outcome. We had three choices. We either play the tournament as originally planned and fit in the game that was canceled last night or we play it by limiting the number of fans who can attend or simply by not having fans or cheerleaders or bands or we simply don't play it. I shouldn't say simply because it's never a simple thing. I have to go back to what's in the best interest of everybody here. We're in a situation today that none of know the extent of the danger that's out there. It's not something you can see. We don't know. It's always wise, if we're going to make a mistake, we're going to make it on the side of caution. We may be accused of ultra-caution. And if that's the case, so be it. I think we made the right decision and I think we made the only decision that was available that made sense. As we move on, when we look back on this and that day will come, we'll know a lot more and say boy, that was a good decision, that was a bad decision or whatever. I don't think there's any way that we won't say it wasn't a good decision.

Q. How tough is it to tell these schools to pack it up and that you're not playing the tournament?

A. That kind of thing is difficult in any circumstances. But, quite frankly, this decision was made by our member institutions and everybody competing in this tournament. It wasn't me sitting back in a room sitting back in a room, going, 'Boy, this his is what we need to do.' Our institutions were involved heavily in this discussion. We were fortunate that we had a previously scheduled Board of Directors or school presidents meeting today. It was a joint meeting of presidents and athletic directors from our member institutions. We were fortunate from the standpoint that all of our school presidents normally wouldn't be here at this time. So we were able to have good input from them and our ADs. As we talked about this, the conversations even extended to what's going on in individual campuses, how are they handling it moving forward. Are they have on-campus classes or are they going online? Are they shutting down? What are they doing? That factored into it also. While I think we're all sensitive to the difficult for the student-athlete of having the season come to an abrupt, unexpected end, the end result was that we didn't have any other decision available to us.

Q. What are the next steps to be taken for the future of the tournament?

A. We'll do a review of our own operation. We'll do a review of what happened. We'll do a review of how we handled it. Relative to the tournament, we're going to be here next year and we'll start planning again. We'll also do a review with the people of the Orleans Arena and the various issues we have to address, ticket refunds being one of them. That's going to take some time. We can probably come up with some things we don't even know about right now. We'll simply do a complete review of the tournament. We would actually do that any year. And then we'll move forward. We try to improve things we can improve on and start planning for the future.

Q. Can you go a little deeper about what the WAC spring sports cancellation entails?

A. All those sports are suspended at this time. There will be no conference competition. Conference championships, as of right now, will not be played. Our board will have a conference call beginning on Monday and we'll have a call each Monday for the next four weeks at least. We will adapt as the situation changes, if it does. We certainly will no more in a week than we know today. We'll know more in two weeks than we know today. But this is also tied in to what's going on individual cases and how that has to be handled. It's one of those situations where we just don't know everything we need to know so we are taking a cautious approach. Come April 1st or Apriil 15th, maybe there will be a different decision made. But as of today, we are prepared to go through the entire spring without playing any conference sports.

Grand Canyon University Athletics

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