Challenging UCF Sports Seasons on Tap

Taped on the hallway wall in the suite of UCF Athletics executive staff offices in the new Roth Athletics Center is a detailed 10-by-29-inch chart of future UCF athletic events.
 
It represents maybe the ultimate challenge for UCF Athletics, easily the greatest multi-month undertaking in Knight history.
 
The columns across the top of the page list all 16 UCF varsity sports. Down the left side of the chart are individual dates from mid-January through the end of May.
 
Shaded boxes indicate dates of competition for each sport over the first five months of 2021.
 
The Knights have been used to busy springs, normally including baseball, softball, men's and women's tennis, men's and women's golf, rowing, and track and field—plus the end of seasons in men's and women's basketball.
 
This time, the chart also includes spring competition in men's and women's soccer, volleyball and cross country. That's because COVID prompted the NCAA, and then the American Athletic Conference, to push its traditional fall sports championships (other than football) into the spring.
 
In addition to expected AAC championships in March in men's and women's basketball, the conference also has rescheduled its fall championships for Feb. 6 in cross country, April 2-3 for volleyball and April 15-17 for men's and women's soccer. Later in April come AAC events for men's and women's golf and men's and women's tennis, followed by baseball, softball, rowing and outdoor track championships in May.
 
Ironically, the minute the printed version of the schedule arrived it was already out of date based on upcoming schedule changes.
 
"The challenge of keeping it up to date on a bulletin board became impossible quickly, so we've already gone to an electronic version," says UCF executive associate athletics director and chief operating officer David Hansen. "Managing changes to the schedule and communicating those to all the people who need to know is critical."
 
To help accomplish that, associate athletics director for brand advancement Jimmy Skiles created new team-by-team contact lists via Teams software so any schedule changes for games, practices or other team events can quickly be distributed.
 
A closer analysis of the shaded boxes provides more detailed evidence of what's to come:
 
--The volleyball season begins Tuesday with a home match against Florida Atlantic (after the two teams play an exhibition the previous day). Men's soccer plays a couple of exhibitions, then begins the regular season with a Feb. 6 home match versus Tulsa. The women open at home the next day against Miami. The women's cross country team competes in only a single regular-season home meet Saturday leading to that Feb. 6 AAC meet.
 
--The AAC men's soccer regular-season dates are Saturdays, while the women play Sundays. The only times both UCF soccer teams are at home on the same weekend are Feb. 6-7 and Feb. 20-21. Volleyball plays two-game series on Fridays and Saturdays. The most crowded home weekend for those three fall sports is Feb. 5-7, when all those teams compete on the UCF campus—on the same weekend both the Knight men's and women's basketball teams also play at home.
 
--The most ambitious weekend for Orlando on-campus competition is March 5-9 (Friday to Tuesday) when there are a dozen combined home events featuring volleyball, men's soccer, baseball, softball and men's and women's tennis (tennis events are contested at the USTA campus in Lake Nona).
 
--The heaviest overall weekend will be the period of March 12-16 when 10 teams compete at once, including the men's basketball squad at the AAC Championship in Fort Worth, Texas. Home events that weekend feature women's soccer, baseball and women's tennis. A second 10-sport weekend comes April 1-3, though only men's soccer and men's tennis play at home. The AAC volleyball championship is set for April 2-3 in Cincinnati.
 
--The slate winds down in May with AAC championships in softball (May 13-15 in Tulsa), rowing (May 16 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee), outdoor track and field (May 14-16 in Tampa, Florida) and baseball (May 25-30 in Clearwater, Florida). The final scheduled UCF home events will be three days (four games) of baseball May 20-22 against Houston.
 
--The complete five-month schedule currently includes 112 home events: 26 in baseball (four doubleheaders), 23 in softball, 13 in women's tennis, 11 in volleyball, 10 in men's tennis, six in men's basketball, six in women's basketball, five in men's soccer, three in rowing, five in women's soccer, two in women's outdoor track and field, one in women's golf and one in cross country. Add to that 15 days of spring football beginning in early March.  
 
The extra-heavy spring slates figure to make the coming months rather busy for UCF support service units that handle facilities and turf management, sports medicine, promotions and marketing, and communications (including social media support for all Knight teams both home and away). In addition, the first-year AAC contract to show events on ESPN+ involves on-campus production responsibilities, meaning those multi-event weekends could involve more televised games than in a normal spring.   
 
Days off are likely to be hard to come by for UCF Athletics staffers. Beginning Saturday, the only days through April that don't include at least one UCF athletic contest (home or away) are (tentatively) Feb. 4, 8 and 11; March 1, 18, 22, 23, 25 and 31, and April 7, 8, 12, 13, 21 and 29.
 
One support area that may not be quite as active is ticket sales. The remaining effects of COVID mean that, after the teams' complimentary admissions are accounted, UCF is likely to sell only about 35 tickets for home softball games and approximately 750 general admission seats for baseball. There will be no ticketing for volleyball and men's and women's soccer—with about 115 seats available for volleyball and 200 for soccer.
 
While the UCF schedule comes as no surprise since the move of the fall sports to spring was  announced last summer, many spring sport schedules have only recently been finalized. The Knight support service units collaborated on a lengthy Zoom call Jan. 13 to ensure all the individual planning exercises had crystalized.
 
Everybody on the UCF staff from athletics director Danny White on down understand there are plenty of exhausting days and weekends ahead—yet there's an exhilarating commitment to meeting the challenge of providing Knight student-athletes every possible form of assistance in their 2021 seasons.
 
Meanwhile, there is no shortage of optimism as all these UCF teams prepare to play:
--Both the volleyball and softball teams have been picked as favorites in the AAC. The UCF softball team stands 22nd in the preseason D1 poll, while the baseball squad is 32nd in the Collegiate Baseball preseason standings.
--The Intercollegiate Tennis Association has put the UCF men 16th and women 18th in its preseason polls. 
 
The UCF women's basketball team is in second place in AAC standings with its current overall 7-2 record (5-1 in AAC play).
 
The Knight spring-sport teams are hoping to pick up where they left off last March when COVID ended their seasons. At that point, the UCF baseball team was 15-3, eighth in the RPI and ranked as high as 12th; softball was 21-5-1 (its 16-2 start was best in school history), seventh in RPI and ranked as high as 22nd; and both tennis teams stood 10-3 and ranked in the top 25 (the women ranked as high as 12th, the men as high as 22nd).
 
The 2020 rowing team had won its only spring regatta coming off five straight top-20 national finishes. Men's golf had played two spring events after a fall victory in the Tavistock Collegiate Invitational that helped the Knights rank 16th. Women's golf had played three spring events, finishing ranked 39th after a No. 13 fall rating. The youthful women's track squad had not yet started its outdoor season.
 
UCF at that point ranked 29th overall in the NACDA Directors' Cup all-sports standings, without the benefit of winter or spring championships.
 
"The biggest concern for us is dealing with schedule changes," says Hansen. "There are schools that have 25 spring sports that deal with this on a normal basis. Take a schedule in January and map it out and you can generally count on most of it happening."
 
But, with COVID ongoing—not only at UCF but on campuses of Knight opponent--changes are expected and almost guaranteed.
 
"When you talk about taking a Saturday event and moving it to a Tuesday, you have to thoroughly evaluate if it's possible," says Hansen. "Do you have the personnel to do it?"
 
There will be things that normally happen at Knight home events that won't be as notable in 2021. Advertising, promotions, marketing and in-game fan entertainment are examples, with all UCF venues dealing with reduced capacities and limited attendance.
 
"Number one, it's about prioritizing the experience of our student-athletes, making sure they can play," says Hansen.
 
UCF teams have expanded their footprints for locker rooms, meeting rooms and events such as strength and conditioning workouts to guard against COVID. That prompted the Knights to take a former storage room at Addition Financial Arena and turn it into a strength and conditioning area now used mainly by the UCF volleyball, tennis and women's golf squads. New locker space for men's and women's soccer on the first floor of the new Roth Athletics Center also has provided more space options.
 
"It's not just games, it's practices and all other team activities," Hansen says.
 
"It's seven days a week, and there's a team aspect of this in terms of everybody in athletics working together."
 
The UCF Athletics staff is ready and waiting.