With December right around the corner, most fall sports here at the University of Massachusetts Boston would have been drawing to close. However, Covid has robbed us of an entire semester of sports. However, recently a vaccine for Covid-19 has been in development at Pfizer Inc in Brazil. So when will this vaccine be available for us, and how will it affect the future of sports here at UMass Boston?

When will the vaccine be available?

According to Pfizer, the Covid vaccine could be available to be supplied to medical facilities by the first quarter of 2021. Pfizer went on to mention that the vaccine has shown to exceed a 90 percent success rate. This is clearly good news for the United States and the entire world as we have been dealing with this virus for nearly a year now.

How might this affect school?

It is pretty much guaranteed that we will be continuing with online learning in the spring semester. Unless the vaccine magically arrived early on in 2021, I don’t see a way where UMass Boston changes their mind and allows students back on campus full-time. However, having a vaccine be available for citizens throughout the Summer should guarantee that in-person school will be coming back in fall 2021.

As a result when will sports resume?

Odds are, sports will not return to UMass Boston until fall of 2021. Even though a vaccine could be ready as early as the first few months of 2021, it is highly unlikely it will make its way to the New England area right away. Chances are that the vaccine won’t be widely accessible until at the very least, Summer of 2021. Obviously this means that we would have basically burned an entire year of sports here at UMass Boston, but ultimately the health of the school’s students and student-athletes holds a priority over everything.

It seems that Covid-19 has messed with the typical schedule for almost all professional sports, so could it also affect the schedule here at UMass Boston? I guess it could be a possibility that if at some point before the Fall it is deemed safe to return to campus, maybe a condensed season for certain sports could take place over the Summer into the Fall to make up for lost time. That would have to be something that the Little East Conference would have to discuss as a whole.

Despite all of the different possibilities and the uncertainty for the future, it is nice to finally hear some sort of good news about a vaccine to fight the Coronavirus. Now we can begin planning on what the future will look like at UMass Boston and its sports teams. 

Will sports go back to normal when this is all finished? Or will there be limited capacity at games due to the fact that maybe not every spectator would have been vaccinated? These are questions that can soon be answered once the vaccine is released to the public. If the vaccine can be distributed to the large majority of US citizens and be more than 90 percent effective, then I don’t see why everything can’t get back to normal come fall of 2021. Obviously, this is all the best case scenario at this point, but it is the first string of hope we have been given in a long time.