This 2020 season has been the most unique and unprecedented time for all sports around the world. Throughout this pandemic, our world has taken many precautions to prioritize the safety of those who may be in danger if they come in contact with this virus. As a result of the precautions in place to keep everyone safe, sports from all around the world were shut down or delayed, altering each sports’ leagues schedule differently. 

The NBA season was just getting towards the end of their regular season, but as COVID-19 started to spread through the U.S., the NBA decided to suspend the season indefinitely on March 11th, 2020. One day after this announcement by the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, the MLB came out and said they were also going to be delaying the start of their season to prevent the spread of the virus. By July 24th, the MLB decided to begin their season, but with an altered schedule. Only 60 games instead of 162were going to be played.

Basketball got back to playing on July 31st, but one thing was similar about these altered seasons, no fans were allowed to be in attendance at the games. Once the NFL started their COVID guidelines regarding fans being the same, no fans were allowed in attendance at the games. Just the teams and the coaching staff in an empty stadium.

In the MLB, the players are not allowed to go out and eat, and must wear masks while traveling from place to place to play. They also get a COVID test every 2 weeks and have their temperature taken before they are allowed to enter the stadium. In the NBA, they created something called the “Bubble”, in Orlando Florida (pictured on the right), to protect the NBA players from any contact with anyone who may have the virus.

The NFL on the other hand, has had many problems with their methods for COVID prevention. There are multiple reasons for this problem, but the main issue may just be how many players they carry on their roster in comparison to all the other sports. This has caused some delays and game cancellations throughout the season for NFL teams. This has slowed down recently, and hopefully by the 2021 seasons, everyone will have a better looking season with proper precautions because of the new knowledge regarding the spread of this virus. 

Even though the seasons started up again, that didn’t mean that COVID just went away. It was still a very big issue and the commissioners from each sport league all came up with similar ways of testing their athletes and coaches to make sure that the environment that they played in was safe for everyone.