Monday evening the University of Tennessee announced that they would finish the spring semester with on-line classes only.

Currently all students including student-athletes are on spring break. Everyone is aware that there will be no athletic championship for spring sports and the SEC has suspended all sport activities until at least April 15th. A date that most you speak with believes will be pushed back for a period of time.

With the cancellation of formal classes and all academic work being done on line, the question for students and student athletes is what does campus life look like for the next two months?

Chancellor Donde Plowman was on VolCalls Monday night and painted a very quiet picture.

“Student’s received an email tonight (Monday) about housing. Now that we know we are not coming back, we are going to be inviting students who left for spring break to come back and get their things. We are going to give them a time frame where they can do that. We know that there are students who need to stay in the dorms. We have international students. We have student athletes. We have students who don’t have a permanent residence and they are going to be able to stay.

“We are encouraging students to take their classes from home.”

Director of Athletics Phillip Fulmer, also a Vol Calls guest, reinforced the chancellor’s statement and made it clear that the Anderson-Training Center will not be buzzing with activity.

"We will not be having workouts,” Fulmer said. “We will not be having meetings and certainly there will be no practices until further notice. The gathering of people together spreads this virus and we are gonna be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

“The ones that need to come back to campus for some reason will come back to campus. That is the young people that might not have the best of home situation, some of our international people. We are likely gonna encourage people to stay home and take their classes online. If they come back, we will support them from a nutrition standpoint and from the medical standpoint and from a mental health standpoint, those are obvious needs that will be taken care of.

For coaches managing a team/program when you can’t get your hands on your players daily provides a unique challenge. For example if a student athlete is not on campus then who’s helping them manage their nutrition? Who’s helping them with physical development? And most importantly who’s helping academically if they are not on campus using resources like the Thornton Center to help them with progression towards a degree and eligibility.

Lady Vol head coach Kellie Harper admitted she was still working through the thoughts of her players not being on campus for the rest of the semester.

“That’s a great question that I do not know the answer to yet. I will be talking to colleagues and peers. I had a coach call me today and ask me how I was handling staffing and what not. There are so many things that we don’t know at this point. The safety of our players, our staff and our community has to be first right now. So I understand that’s going to limit people coming back to campus. I get that. Just doing the best we can first in managing their academics. That means there will be a lot of FaceTime utilized with our academic support staff, with our assistant coaches, with me and our players making sure we have some face to face contact. With technology we can do that just to keep them on track academically. We just have to take it day by day and see how things go.”

Monday brought another change to the University as the traditional academic life is finished for the semester. For student-athletes and coaches that news brings more uncertainty to their athletic world for at least the next couple of months.