Ivy League Already Cancels 2021-22 Seasons

The Ivy League announced this week that it is canceling all sports seasons for the remainder of 2021, as well as 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Robin Harris, executive director of the Ivy League, held a press conference to announce the decision.

“I am pleased to say that our great league will not be playing sports for the foreseeable future,” Harris said. “We are once again taking the lead on this issue, and I am determined to uphold our league’s reputation as the safest conference in America.”

Based on her Zoom background, Harris appeared to be on a beach during the press conference. She would not divulge her location, but sources close to the situation are reporting that Harris has been vacationing in the COVID-19 hot spot Puerto Rico.

Harris went on to outline the plans for a potential 2023 return to play.

“We are in the process of manufacturing personalized body bubbles for each of our student-athletes. These bubbles resemble the ones that parents put their children in when they want them to burn off some steam without injuring themselves.

“Student-athletes will wear these body bubbles during competition and in the classroom, and we trust that the other major conferences such as the Southeastern Conference will follow our lead by utilizing this technology.”

The Ivy League’s decision to cancel the 2021-22 season comes just three weeks after Penn Athletics Director M. Grace Calhoun announced that she was leaving Penn for the head of athletics job at Brown University. Calhoun sat down with The Daily Pennsylvanian for an exclusive interview, something she had never done during her seven-year tenure.

“I have to be honest, I knew this decision to cancel Ivy League sports was coming,” Calhoun said. “So I thought the best course of action would be to go to a school where most students don’t know that sports exist there.”

We wanted to get a sense for how this decision would affect the entire West Philadelphia community, so we interviewed the first three people* we saw walking around on 42nd and Walnut streets. All three said that they weren’t personally consulted about the decision to cancel Ivy League sports. Shame on you, Ivy League.

We also wanted to get the perspective of student-athletes, so we sent a message in the DP-wide Slack channel asking to interview student-athletes, but only ones who were furious with the Ivy League. Sure enough, we got two angry Penn athletes to talk to us. Both of them said the same exact thing.

“The best part about playing sports at an Ivy League school was that we could look down upon all the non-athletic losers who don’t know what it’s like to be real adults and have to go to practice from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, while also juggling a full course load at a top-tier institution,” they said simultaneously in their puffy Penn Athletics winter coats.

It’s safe to say that no one is happy with Ivy sports being canceled for yet another year, but Harris didn’t seem to care. When asked about the negative effects that this decision could have on the schools themselves, Harris rolled her eyes, muted her mic, and sauntered off to the beach, where she indulged in shots of Don Julio with her spring break posse.

*Correction: It was later discovered that these three people were not actually West Philadelphia residents and that they were, in fact, personally consulted by the Ivy League. The DP regrets the error, but not really.