According to the university, Texas Longhorns athletes across four sports — football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and volleyball — are all free of active COVID-19 infections after recent testing.
The Tuesday news from the school confirms what Texas head coach Tom Herman said last week in a virtual appearance with the Houston Touchdown Club. No football players are in self-isolation, either, as the school prepares to ramp up testing in August from once a week to twice a week.
The soccer team will start testing this week as part of the on-boarding process that men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and volleyball recently went through without any positive tests. The basketball programs are now allowed eight hours of instruction per week, including four hours on the court.
Athletics director Chris Del Conte is also paying close attention to the return of professional sports in an effort to learn further lessons about playing during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ll be following closely the progress of the professional leagues and all the efforts they’re making,” Del Conte wrote in his weekly “Forty Acres Insider.” “How they handle the challenges that arise will be critical experiences and examples to learn from as we manage our plans for sporting events this fall. We, of course, are continuing to move forward ourselves as we have developed and implemented safety protocols in handling the on-boarding and training of our student-athletes in football, men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball with soccer returning this week, but we’re so grateful for the professional sports leagues. They’re blazing the trail and providing us critical and extremely valuable information to study as we plan and prepare for the safest environment possible with the kickoff of our fall seasons on the horizon.”
For the football program, preseason practices begin on Aug. 7.