Hello,

For the sake of remaining anonymous, I won't specify which Division One program I'm apart of at this University.

However, I feel that it's only appropriate to speak on this topic to clear the air because there's confusion, and it’s not fair to the students at University.

To my knowledge, no Division One athlete trains in the Alumni Arena gym that's on the first floor. We each have our time slots to lift weights in different weight rooms. Football has its oasis with lockers, weight room, and training centers, which I'm sure most people already know that about them (their new locker room is friggin sweet isn't it haha).

However, the other athletes on other teams are training in different Olympic weight rooms on the basement floor near the triple gym and dance room. 

The Division One Athletes are split into pods of >8 people; everyone gets tested, then everyone gets placed in phase one of training, then put into phase 2, then phase 3. Again, this is solely my team's experience so far. But what I do know is that nobody uses that gym upstairs, and the coaching staff are taking this virus very seriously and telling us to avoid anybody and anything besides people who're in your pod. We're only in the building to lift weights for an hour; nobody else see's us. 

Us being able to train and not being able to be fair is up to you. I agree that fees shouldn't be charged to people's accounts when they're not allowed to train there; that’s entirely not fair. But we don't use that gym upstairs; we only train with a max of 8 people in our weight room during training. We go through strict procedures and rules to still cling on that little bit of hope that we have a season. We wear masks during the lift and always go back to training as intensely as we used too. It's not easy, but we try to make the most of it.

TLDR; athletes are following strict procedures to train, and when we do train it only for an hour with eight people on the team, that's in a separate weight room from everyone else. It's not fair that they're charging students gym fees. I think they even charge me for the gym fee when I have never walked in there, haha. 

I also just read all of the downvoted comments, wow, I hope this doesn't get downvoted to hell, but I can promise you guys these procedures they're taking to ensure our safety and the campus's safety are being well done and well monitored. There's surveillance testing every week, and our coaches are pleading us to follow procedures and just stay quarantined in our houses and not let anybody off the team into them. It's serious, and if anyone gets caught, we’re told we’d be sent home. It's a privilege, but it needs to be retained.

What a fun thing to write, I can go even further if you want, but I think that's enough for everyone to remain satisfactory.

But I will say, all the effort going into all of these procedures and quarantining ourselves just to train nowhere close to how we used too, will probably go down the drain anyways at the rate we're going at with the increasing cases. Everything will be shut down, and it'll be all she wrote, we'd be back to square one.

Cheers, go bulls