After a month of battling coronavirus, Duquesne ready to resume season
Share this post:
Duquesne coach Keith Dambrot doesn’t need to guess how his players touched by the coronavirus are coping and recovering.
“You look in their eyes, and you can see they’ve been sick,” he said. “It’s not like anything I’ve seen before. It takes them two, three days to even resemble themselves out there.”
After nearly a month of starting and stopping practice, canceling a road trip while the bus was warming up and trying to stay in reasonably good condition, Duquesne’s covid-ravaged team is ready to resume its season. The Dukes have reached this point after all but three of 18 players tested positive for covid-19 at one time or another.
The first game since Dec. 2 — and third overall — is scheduled for Wednesday at Saint Louis against, perhaps, the best team in the Atlantic 10. The Billikens (7-1) are not ranked in the Associated Press poll, but they received 49 voting points in the most recent balloting.
“It won’t be easy. They’re a good team. They’ve played a lot of games,” Dambrot said. “They got a great fan base that won’t be there. That’s one good thing.”
Small consolation, however.
“It will be one of the harder deals, but we can’t make any excuses. We have to figure out a way to win,” Dambrot said.
The Dukes (1-1) went two weeks from Dec. 12-26 without any full-squad practices. They resumed workouts Saturday after players — those fortunate enough to be allowed to go home — returned from Christmas break.
Dambrot confronts the challenge on three levels.
• “I try not to think about it,” he said.
• “I know it’s going to be a two-week process to really get our team to where we want to get them.”
• “The third thing is I get paid to win games, regardless of the circumstances. Nobody cares. All they care about at the end of the year is who won that game and who won that game and what their record is. We just have to put our big-boy pants on and compete.”
Dambrot said players are tested almost every day at considerable expense to the university, and the past five have turned up no more positive results. Dambrot is hoping everyone will be available Wednesday, with the exception of freshman guard Mike Bekelja, who has a stress fracture.
Senior forward Marcus Weathers said he senses no fear among his teammates who must walk on and off airplanes and busses and in and out of hotels and gymnasiums while trying to avoid the virus. No one opted out, something college football teams dealt with all season.
“No fear at all. I’m just super excited to play, really grateful to play,” Weathers said.
Dambrot said he understands how his players might feel.
“I’m 62,” he said. “I’m probably in more harm’s way than them. If I get sick, I have to battle.
“I wouldn’t hold it against anybody who wanted to opt out. I’d understand it. It’s a physical and mental issue. We’ve been shut down so many darn times, I feel like we’re starting over every single time.”
Dambrot demands perfection and preparedness from his players, but under these circumstances, he must adjust.
“I know I’m not too comfortable. I know there are parts of the game we’re not going to be very good at,” he said.
“We can only do so much every single day. I’m just trying to get them in shape and feeling good about themselves.”
The first step is actually resuming the schedule.
“We just have to get back on the horse that threw us off,” he said. “This isn’t going to be a quick fix. We’re going to have to work to get better. We’re certainly not going to play our best basketball.”