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FAYETTEVILLE — For close to 30 minutes last Thursday morning, Hunter Yurachek took questions on a wide range of topics from local media members on a Zoom videoconference.
It was the first time in nearly six months that the Arkansas athletics director met with the media as a whole and he covered a lot of ground. If you’d like to watch the entire interview, click here.
HawgBeat has already written several stories from the availability, which are linked below, but Yurachek also touched on several other things that haven’t been covered. We’ve compiled those topics into a catch-all notebook…
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Handling the Virus
Since the sports world came to a grinding halt last March, the coronavirus pandemic has been at the forefront of Yurachek’s duties.
Luckily, it sounds like all of the work Arkansas has put into a safe return to play has paid off. From June 1 through last Wednesday, the department did just over 18,000 COVID-19 tests among student-athletes, coaches and support staff and had a positivity rate below 1.2 percent. That works out to about 216 positive cases.
As of last Thursday, Yurachek said there were no active cases among the 12 sports currently in season.
That is a credit to all of the Razorbacks’ coaches, trainers, strength and conditioning staff members and nutritionists, Yurachek said, as they have reinforced the message of appropriate behavior to all of the athletes. He added that it’s easy to control the situation when they’re within the UA facilities, but the key is making sure they follow those procedures when they leave campus.
“I think our student-athletes want to compete in their sports,” Yurachek said. “They invest a great deal of their time in training and want to play their sports. As you look at our spring sports that had their seasons cut short last year and were heading into their spring season, they're all taking it extremely seriously.”
Although there have been postponements and rescheduled games - such as men’s basketball replacing Tulsa with Southern and women’s basketball replacing Vanderbilt with UConn - only one of 91 scheduled events has been completely canceled. That is the football team’s matchup with TCU in the Texas Bowl, and that was due to COVID-19 issues within the Horned Frogs’ program.
