Huskies a No-Go at XL

UConn announced that all regular season home basketball games (men's and women's) will be
played at Gampel Pavilion this coming season. Hockey games will be played at Freitas Ice
Forum. Both venues are on the UConn Storrs campus.

By Bob Phillips

STORRS—Add the XL Center to the list of COVID-19 victims. The state's largest indoor sports and entertainment venue announced on Wednesday that it will not host UConn men's and women's basketball games and UConn hockey games for the 2020-21 season. Gampel Pavilion will host all home games for basketball, and Mark Edward Freitas Ice Forum will be home for all UConn hockey games this season. Both venues are located on the UConn campus. Whether or not fans will be allowed to attend—and if so, how many and under what kind of conditions—is a matter of conjecture.

In the end, the decision to move the 2020-21 home season to Storrs was pretty simple. It came down to money.

“We have to pay rent if we use that facility, and I don’t think that financially it makes sense for either one of us if we’re in the situation that we currently are, which is if there’s going to be very few fans allowed to attend games,” Benedict said. “It just doesn’t make financial sense for either one of us.”

The decision to play all home games in Storrs comes as a disappointment to many Connecticut basketball fans who were looking forward to the return of the Huskies to the Big East this season—particularly at the XL Center, which serves as home court for several Husky games each season and is far more accessible than Storrs to fans in most parts of the state.

“For us and our student-athletes, when we do go down there we don’t control all the staffing and what their testing protocols are going to be,” continued Benedict. “Certainly there’s a significant concern, and we’re doing a lot to minimize exposure or risk to our coaches and student-athletes coming in contact with people. We’re already doing all those things on our campus.”

Benedict hopes to have a better idea of what the schedules will look like for his men’s and women’s basketball teams in the next couple weeks.

“In this case, I think we both agreed it made the most sense to play our games on campus at this point,” he said.

The Big East men's and women's basketball championship tournaments have not yet been affected by COVID-19. The men's tournament is scheduled to be played at Madison Square Garden as usual, and the women's tournament is slated for the Moehgan Sun Arena in March.

—with staff reports