Tag: Social Distancing

Dolphins Announce Plan for Fans to Attend Games Amidst COVID-19 and Social Distancing Concerns

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Yahoo – Hard Rock Stadium can hold around 65,000 fans, but Garfinkel said it might be closer to a 15,000-fan maximum this season to adjust to social distancing and to keep everyone safe. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) currently recommends keeping six feet (two arms lengths) from other people and to avoid crowded places and mass gatherings.

The team would also schedule arrivals and assist with exiting after the game. The plans include fans being required to wear masks...The examples show colored spots on the ground to show what six feet of distancing looks like, not unlike what grocery stores have done near registers to keep from having a mass crush of people together in one spot.

Attendees would order food from their seats and leave to pick it up instead of waiting in line, just as people are doing elsewhere with curbside pickup.

I’m holding out hope for some semblance of sports to resume later this summer, but I’m not exactly optimistic. By all accounts, it would seem our best bet of sports returning any time soon is some form of games without fans in attendance. Even that has plenty of hurdles to overcome, most of which revolve around logistics. The NBA has kicked around the idea of every team playing a tournament in Las Vegas, while basically on lockdown in a bubble. MLB has considered restructuring leagues and having teams play games in just a handful of Spring Training stadiums to reduce cross country travel, but even that would require players to be away from their families for four months straight. So every story you read about how or when sports can return leaves me with a pretty bleak outlook.

However, a failure to plan is a plan to fail so teams are doing their due diligence and trying to figure out how exactly they could safely allow fans back in the stadiums.

The Dolphins came out with a proposed plan of how to safely bring back fans once the government gives the green light and it has a serious dystopian future vibe.

  • 15,000 fans allowed in the stadium (compared to 65,000 normally)
  • All fans required to wear masks
  • Order food and drinks from your seats rather than waiting in line
  • Staggered arrival times and exiting “much like a church environment, where each row exits so people aren’t filing out all at the same time in a herd.”

Before all this I was a borderline germaphobe, so I am not going to be one of the first fans jumping through hoops just to pay $200 to attend a game in person. Sports on TV would be more than enough for me right now, but you know plenty of people are dying to get out of the house and return to something resembling normal.

Who knows, maybe this becomes the preferred way of going to a game and it acts like a form of EZ-Pass. With just 15,000 people and assigned entrance times you could just breeze into town and right up to your seat. Anyone who has been to a Pats game in the last decade knows its a 3 hour tour just getting out of the parking lot and back home after a game. OR the demand for tickets will go through the roof because of the limited supply and we’ll all look back and laugh at how cheap $200 Patriots tickets were before COVID.

It’s crazy to think about how the next Patriots home game could look more like a college lacrosse game with less than a quarter of the seats filled, and have it not be because Tom Brady’s gone. It’s going to take a long time for things to return to normal, if at all, depending on how long the coronavirus lingers. So until then we’ll have to take what we can get as everything from our offices to bars and restaurants to concerts and games at Gillette Stadium slowly figures out how to bring people back together once again.

QUARANTINE BLOG: Let’s Check In On My 300s Brothers In Ink Under QUARANTIIIIINE

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It’s week 4 of quarantine. I think. Maybe. Time is sort of relative at this point, no? I know I’ve personally been unable to enter any business that isn’t a grocery store or liquor store in now going on four weeks so that’s how I’m gauging it.

If you scroll through social media or the internet in general you’ll see people clinging to varying degrees of sanity. A lot of folks are blaming this on lack of social interaction or inability to go outside their homes in general as free as they once could. That is probably it, to a large extent. However I don’t think you can rule out the pure and simple fact that we as a society by and large don’t know how to live without a destination/obligations. We simply cease to know how to exist when we have nowhere to be. Just my two cents.

Anyway I reached out to my brethren in blogs and asked them how they were holding up, and got a variety of responses. With that said, enjoy, empathize, and commiserate below.

Red: It’s Week 4 (Week 5?) of the new norm that is social distancing and quarantine SZN. Some are taking it more seriously than others, but as someone who refused to touch the railings on the T before all this, I am taking it quite seriously. Didn’t even bother with a flimsy mask either, straight up ordered a balaclava, which I’m pretty sure you’d only know what that is if you played massive amounts of first person shooters growing up or were in the Spetsnaz. The quarantine is taking its toll though as my office chair officially called it a career and took its own inanimate life last week. So now I’m working from the couch for 8-16 hours a day as the health of my spine is in a race against the clock with Amazon Prime to deliver my new office chair before I develop spinal stenosis. This is fun.

Dom: (Blogger’s Note: Fuck Dom). My quarantine is different in the sense that I’m in Israel and have a balcony that overlooks the Mediterranean. It’s dope, I’m not gonna lie. But that balcony is also the only thing keeping my sanity intact. You can only spend so many hours doing puzzles and listening to audiobooks. I’ve been playing a good amount of The Show with my star 3rd basemen Rusty Weiner and lefty ace Rube Waddell. Oh yeah, I have a mustache now.

Big Z: Last week was bulky waste pick up day in my town. The show must go on, right? It was the most exciting event at my house in weeks. I call it the purge. I threw away a ton of shit, some even left behind by the previous owner of my house. Even better, I got rid of a busted TV. (Don’t buy Westinghouse TVs, friends.) Now, my town was not picking up TVs that day. I lucked out when some young men found this TV in the box, with the stand and remote control included, and took it off my hands. I wonder how disappointed they were when they got it home and realized that it had no picture.

Papa G: I’ve been writing lots of music (varying degrees of quality), reading James Bond novels, busted out Rosetta Stone for about an hour and brushed up on my Spanish 101. A few naps. Lots of anxiety.

Lippa: Pros: Sleeping in, exercising more saving money, started binging this little known show called “The Sopranos” Attempting to prove to my bosses that working from home CAN be effective. Remember these things called jeans? My wardrobe is just a mix of sweatpants and mesh shorts depending on the temperature

Cons: Would love to watch a sports game, I don’t already know the outcome to. We’d be in the middle of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs today (but who’s keeping track) You can only go on so many walks in a day.  Remember bars? I think I’m approaching the end screen of Netflix.

Joey B: I like Red suffered a casualty of war this week as one of my pair of slippers, an integral part of my at-home life, was lost in battle. Up to that point I considered this whole viral episode to be my Shackleton’s Expedition – as long as we (myself and all my possessions) all made it out alive I’d declare it a victory. I think Shackleton and his men survived like, a year and a half living on the Antarctic sea. My slippers made it under four weeks. Other than that I am keeping my wits through a cornucopia of TV, a lack of haircuts, booze, video chats featuring said booze, and Uber Eats. We’ll get through this together.