By Morris Phillips

BERKELEY–The Washington-Cal Bears football game scheduled for Saturday night has been canceled due to a player’s positive COVID test, and the subsequent quarantining of the Cal players in his position group.

The decision to quarantine the infected player’s position mates was made by the Berkeley Public Health Department in keeping with their mandates through contact tracing. The player registering the positive test remains asymptomatic, but those student-athletes who were deemed to be in close contact with him must quarantine for 14 days, the period of time in which the virus could surface due to the contact.

That means along with Saturday’s cancelation, the Bears’ game at Arizona State scheduled for November 14 could also be in jeopardy once individual timeline’s are determined for each quarantined individual based on their most recent contact with the athlete registering positive.

“I think part of this is tough to swallow because the players and our athletic department, coaches, athletes tried to do the best we can with the information we had. And unfortunately, it didn’t quite do the job because they still were contact-traced. They don’t talk to us about those specific scenarios,” Cal coach Justin Wilcox said.

Only 20 student athletes at Cal have registered positive tests since on-campus activities resumed along with regular testing on June 4. This was the first positive test within the football program, and couldn’t have come at worse time with two games of the team’s abbreviated six-game schedule jeopardized without the possibility of being rescheduled.

Further, the Bears had received positive reviews from Pac-12 journalists who touted the team’s experience and talent relative to their conference opponents. The outset of the season also gave the entire athletic department hope that they could lessen the financial issues within the program caused by a series of annual financial deficits.