Samford Sports Weekly: Aug. 7, 2020

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Today we begin the 2020-21 season of Samford Sports Weekly, a series highlighting Samford's coaches and staff throughout the academic year. Today's first edition will feature Matt Price, Samford's Director of Sports Performance and Head Athletic Trainer.

Price is entering his seventh season on the Samford Athletics staff and his second in his current position. Price spent his first five years at Samford as the school's Head Football Athletic Trainer.

Price and his staff have been instrumental in the planning and implementation of safely bringing Samford's student-athletes back to campus with the school's new COVID-19 protocol.

"It took a lot of collaboration," Price said. "A lot of collaboration with our administrators on campus, our team physicians, the medical director for Samford Athletics. We were working with the SoCon, the CDC and the Safer at Home guidelines for the state of Alabama. So, we were reviewing all of that information, trying to look at other SoCon schools just to see what everybody's doing so we were all on the same page, doing all of that, looking at the information and just trying to figure out what's best for our student-athletes.

"A lot of time went into that," Price said. "I think we started looking into this in May, if not sooner, trying to go through that and navigate that. It worked out really well, we have our athletes back on campus, or at least most of them at this point. We're moving in the right direction, just taking it day-by-day at this point."

Samford welcomed student-athletes for football, soccer, volleyball, men's basketball and women's basketball back to campus July 24^th. Price and his staff were in charge of organizing the testing of each student-athlete for COVID-19. He said he was pleased with how things went that day.

"It went really smoothly," Price said. "I'd like to attribute that to all of the meetings we had, the work beforehand, and it just paid off that day and everything went very smoothly. Physicals went great, COVID testing went great. I think if anything came out of this, we learned a different way of doing things for the future, and I'd like to attribute that a lot to our athletic trainers, our strength and conditioning coaches that stepped up and helped us and the testing site that helped us get all of those tests performed."

The new COVID-19 guidelines have changed the way the athletic training room and weight room are run. Price talked a little about the changes that have had to be made in those areas.

"The biggest change in the training room is that it is not a place to just hang out like it used to be," Price said. "We try to be inviting and have athletes come in and hang out with us and talk with us and communicate and just kind of go over the day and how they're doing. That's been a big change because now it is appointment-based only. We have a max number of athletes that can come in there right now. I think they've really bought into it and it seems to work really well right now.

"It's the same thing in the weight room," Price said. "We've really had to look at, scheduling-wise, what that looks like, making sure that they're appointment-based as well. We've only got one weight room for football and one weight room for the Pete Hanna Center Olympic Sports. So, we've been navigating that, looking at how that is going to work, especially with, on top of that, the cleaning process that goes into that."

Price also talked about the guidelines and procedures should a student-athlete or coach test positive during their season.

"There are a lot of people involved in that," Price said. "If someone does test positive, there is a chain of command we have to follow. We have to navigate that and make sure we are doing our contact tracing, and also we would reach out to the university in terms of letting them know we do have someone who tested positive, what does that look like? It's different for a staff member versus a student-athlete.

"Right now, housing and the university have done a great job of helping us when we had our first round of COVID testing, they helped us with housing, trying to isolate the ones that are positive and quarantine the ones that come in contact with a positive," Price said. "They've done a tremendous job of that. With that, if you do test positive, we follow the CDC guidelines, we're always in constant contact with our team physicians to make sure that we're following that, and what they're wanting is what's best for our staff and student-athletes. So, right now the CDC recommends 10 days for isolation as long as no one presents symptoms or they start decreasing or diminishing symptoms."

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