Arizona is one state where the coronavirus pandemic is slowly starting to go in the right direction once again after a surge in recent weeks. That has athletic director Dave Heeke feeling more optimistic about the chance of football being played this fall. President Robert C. Robbins announced that UA remains set for an Aug. 24 start to the fall semester with a mix of in-person and distance learning coming to campus this year.

It is a step in a positive direction for the reality of football before the end of 2020. As of now the expectation is that the Pac-12 will announce a 10-game schedule some time next week after previously announcing that the league would move to only conference games this season.

That will be just the first step toward getting players back on the field and games going once again after college sports was halted back in March because of the COVID-19 outbreak.

“We’re targeting the end of the month here, so we’re looking like next Thursday or Friday of trying to have a finalized agreement that our presidents, obviously there’s a lot of people involved and there’s a lot of moving parts, but the presidents at the universities can agree upon as things continue,” Heeke said on the Eye on the Ball radio show on 1030 AM in Tucson this week. “It’s one thing to put the schedule together. Then you start working back on when practice starts, when fall camp starts, when people can get into different segments of their training that has been so disrupted going through the summer.”

The decision to cancel the nonconference portion of the season eliminated three games for Pac-12 teams, including Arizona which had to cancel games against Hawaii, Portland State and Texas Tech. UA's game against Hawaii had been set to take place in late August and Heeke believes there simply wouldn't have been enough time to have everything in place in time for that game.

UA still has not restarted its reentry plan after halting the process of bringing athletes back to campus last month amid the surge in positive coronavirus cases in Pima County.

“We needed more time,” Heeke said. “There was no way that we were going to be able to begin football and our conference had three different schools starting on Week Zero, that last Saturday in August. It was really about being able to control and push the schedule back, because we were not going to be able to play on those early weekends. It’s very unlikely that we would be prepared.

“We haven’t brought all of our kids back to campus. They won’t be prepared, and believe me there are some who are in a much more dire straits than we are at Arizona.”

So far there are around 85 football players on campus that continue to go through voluntary workouts, but newcomers have not yet been given clearance to arrive in Tucson so the start of training camp will naturally be pushed back because of the delay.

Time is something that Heeke is leaning on quite a bit in all aspects of a return to competition and that includes how the program will go about bringing fans back to games.

“We’re going to delay the season, so it’s going to start later in September and who knows maybe even later,” Heeke said. “So, we’ve got a little bit more time now. It’s not like we’re starting on August 29th. We’ve got a few more weeks here that we can move forward and see. I do think under the current climate, reading the tea leaves, our crowd sizes and capacity is reducing. I think it’s going to be hard to get to 50 percent.

“I think we’re creeping back to a much smaller number of people attending any of our events whether that’s football or soccer or volleyball. Lots of social distancing, lots of procedures and protocols when we think about food service and we think about parking and we think about tailgating all those things are going to be modified dramatically. It’s gonna be a much different experience, but I do hope we can have people come and at least support the team and watch the team and be part of it.”

Heeke has been encouraged by the most recent trend around Arizona when it comes to the coronavirus numbers. Arizona announcing that it will allow some in-person learning this fall is another step in the right direction giving the UA athletic director a reason to be more optimistic about sports returning this fall.

“Hopefully we make little steps all the time,” he said. “I do believe that while Arizona has been in a tough situation with cases and our COVID numbers, it does seem to be slowing a little bit. I don’t want to talk like I’m an expert because I’m not, but it does seem like we’ve got some control and it’s not spiraling upward like it was so that’s a good a thing.

“Hopefully we can see that trend of a plateau or some downward movement, however that gets measured because those become positive moments. ... We’re getting close to clutch time, we really are.”

Getting to next week and an expected schedule announcement is a big step in the process, but Heeke is feeling more positive now than a few weeks ago.

“I am optimistic, I am bullish we’re gonna do it,” he said. “Certainly football and the scheduling thing is focused on the fall. We want this to happen in the fall. We have not entertained a spring schedule, really. That’s kind of always there. It’s kind of up on the shelf, we know it’s there and we can move to it, but let’s exhaust every once of possibilities for the fall.”

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