Kentucky AD Mitch Barnhart: ‘I don’t know how we’ll ever be at 100 percent capacity’
University of Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart made his first public-facing statements in quite a while during the Lexington Rotary Club’s Zoom meeting on Thursday.
Barnhart, a guest speaker, spoke for a little more than 30 minutes during his appearance, the first in which he publicly answered questions since the March postponement, and later cancellation, of UK’s remaining sporting events in the 2019-20 school year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kentucky’s first scheduled fall sporting event was to be Sept. 3, when the football team was scheduled to host Eastern Michigan at Kroger Field. The Southeastern Conference announced a couple hours after Barnhart spoke to the Rotary on Thursday that the league would play only conference games this season in football and that the season would kick off Sept. 26. No guidelines have yet been revealed by the SEC or UK concerning the presence of spectators at sporting events during the pandemic.
Barnhart addressed the subject of football capacity — as well as that at Rupp Arena — in response to a Rotary member’s question late in the call.
“In terms of capacity, I think a lot of that’s going to come out of Frankfort,” Barnhart said. “We’re watching the Kentucky Derby very closely to see how the Derby is managed. That comes up on Sept. 5. Others states, you’ve heard 50 percent, you’ve heard different numbers, and social distancing.”
He noted another phrase — “social separation” — that’s more inclusive of groups, like families, who might be able to visit a venue and sit with one another, and that pod be 6 feet apart from another group or individuals.
The chances of 61,000 fans piling into Kroger Field this fall appear to be zero, though.
“I will say, I don’t know how we’ll ever be at 100 percent capacity or what we’ll call that,” Barnhart said. “We’ll have to figure something up. I would love to have fans in the stands. I don’t know where I fall on percentages, but I want as many people in there watching the Cats as we can get in there. So we’ll leave it at that. We’ve gotta step through football first before we figure out basketball. One step at a time.”
Barnhart earlier in the call talked finances. The athletic department in June proposed an operating budget of $148.5 million for the 2020-21 school year, a 17 percent decrease from its budget in 2019-20.
He noted that travel will be affected, in part because of finances but also because of considerations that need to be made for players’ well-being in the classroom. He provided an example of the volleyball team, which last year traveled to Houston and used a private charter in order to speed up travel and get players back to school at an appropriate hour to not disrupt their classwork.
Increased online instruction provides some flexibility, but many teams will need to focus their travel more within a six-hour radius of Lexington that can be handled by bus or commercial planes.
“It could affect our competitive ability but we’re limited in what we can do and there are some resource capabilities that we’ll have to acknowledge, and we’ll have to change how we do a little bit of our work,” Barnhart said. “And we’re not the only ones. Schools all across the country are making the same adjustments.”
He pulled back the curtain on some procedures unique to current workouts: for example, quarterbacks on the football team are not meeting with one another physically as a means of attempting to mitigate any potential breakout within that position group (other position groups are following suit).
“If you have all of your quarterbacks in one meeting and one of them gets it, all of ‘em are gone,” Barnhart said. “So we’re separating quarterbacks in meetings. We’re separating offensive linemen. Guys in the same position (group) aren’t next to each other, they’re not coming into the facility at the same time. ...
“It’s a really different dynamic. I think it’s hard to build a team through that. It’s really hard to stay connected, and those are things that the best teams are.”
Barnhart paraphrased a recent quote from Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers, who noted that whoever wins the NBA championship this year will have earned it, given all the circumstances surrounding it.
“He said that for a lot of reasons — health, the environment, living in a bubble, all of that stuff. Understand one thing: none of this will be fair. People are going to say that was unfair to one team or unfair to my group. There will be people that, as we try to unfold what we’re trying to do, they’re gonna say, ‘Hey, this is unfair.’ But I think there’s a really good lesson in all of that.
“Sometimes it isn’t fair and we just gotta find our way through.”
This story was originally published July 30, 2020 at 2:24 PM.
