The Quinnipiac men’s ice hockey team has COVID-19 to thank for their NCAA playoff berth.
The Bobcats (17-7-4) scored a spot in the NCAA hockey championship this weekend taking the place of the St. Lawrence Saints (6-8-3), the team who beat them. Despite the disappointing overtime time loss in the ECAC championship a day prior, Quinnipiac was given an automatic bid to the national tournament after the Saints’ head coach, Brent Brekke, tested positive for COVID-19 which forced the team out of the tournament. However, the Bobcats were likely to receive a bid anyways because of their national rank.
After the news broke about St. Lawrence, Notre Dame and Michigan also had to pull out of the tournament due to positive cases within their teams. The NCAA was able to catch the positive cases before an outbreak because of its strict schedule of screening and contact tracing protocols.
The Bobcats were scheduled for COVID-19 screenings when they arrived, the following night, the morning before their game and the morning of their game.
Quinnipiac head coach Rand Pecknold said he has a good understanding of the COVID-19 protocols and how to be flexible.
“You got to adapt,” Pecknold said. “And I kept telling the guys you’ve got to adapt to different things and we’ve got to coach different ways, and we’ve got to do things differently and make sacrifices as we go along.”
Pecknold said there are two things he has focused on this year: “Don’t let the kids get COVID and be careful of contact tracing.”
“Not just your players, but your coaches too, you can’t meet as a staff,” said Pecknold. “We’ve had times where we’ve all been in our offices and we’ll FaceTime.”
Team Captain and forward Odeen Tufto spoke about how COVID-19 has impacted the team in regards to their preparation.
Credit: Rob Rasmussen
“I think it kind of comes down to all year,” said Tufto. “I mean we’ve had to make some sacrifices and you know it’s been different for a college athlete than the normal year.”
Tufto said he feels for the teams who were pulled out of the tournament due to positive test results but is focused on keeping his team healthy.
“Obviously seeing a couple of the teams unfortunately have tested positive so we try to do our best at isolating and staying safe,” said Tufto. “We had kind of a big outbreak early in the year, so maybe we lucked out a little bit there, but you know just staying safe and wearing our masks and doing everything we can obviously to not test positive.”
While Quinnipiac has COVID-19 to thank this time around, they were not so lucky in the beginning of the season. The team postponed three games at the start of their season, one of them being the season opener, after two positive test results from within the program.
Alternate captain and forward Wyatt Bongiovanni says that there is always a concern for another outbreak.
“It’s such an unknown, you know, you never know, and something like that can happen,” said Bongiovanni. “Unfortunately for those teams, they got unlucky and at the end of the day our coaches have been very strict and adamant on maintaining our bubble.”
Bongiovanni, who is playing in just his second game back since December due to injury, does not want to fall victim to mistakes regarding COVID-19.
“Sometimes I think it’s a little crazy,” said Bongiovanni. “But at the end of the day, it works and you know, you gotta do what you gotta do to play.”
The Bobcats take on Minnesota State (20-4-1) in the first round of the NCAA tournament on March 27 at 5 p.m. EST.
The full schedule COVID screenings for the NCAA Tournament West Regional can be found here:
