Many university athletic departments have worked with local health experts this year to find a way back onto the playing field, and nowhere was that more evident than at Florida, where AD Scott Stricklin and Dr. Michael Lauzardo made it possible for the Gators to return to competition. Stricklin, speaking during the Learfield IMG College Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, said Lauzardo was "probably the MVP of not just the Athletic Association here at the University of Florida, but the entire campus community in so many ways, from what he has set up from a testing, from a tracing standpoint, but just the protocols that have allowed us to come back from being locked down in the spring to re-emerging."
ON THE FLY: Lauzardo noted building out protocols and testing procedures has been stressful and difficult, because "as one of my colleagues had said, we're building the airplane while we're flying it. All this stuff is new. There are a lot of challenges." Stricklin noted several people from Lauzardo's team have been on call for UF athletics to provide advice during the pandemic. Early on, his team members came in and "they walked through our entire facility and made recommendations on you can use this facility, this facility is not going to be appropriate because it was too tight or it doesn't have proper ventilation." Stricklin: "All these different things that we don't ever think about in normal times, we had to re-envision and we leaned almost exclusively on our UF health team to do that."
