By Aidan Joly
Leaders in college sports have made some half-hearted attempts at doing something about court and field storms the past few years.
After Duke’s Kyle Filipowski was injured during a court storm after Wake Forest upset the Blue Devils on Saturday, it becomes even more apparent that it is time to take action.
Blue Devils coach Jon Scheyer’s comments after the game rang true, after he saw that happen to his best player and a likely NBA lottery pick. Scheyer said it was a sprained ankle, but Filipowski later corrected him and said it was a a knee injury.
Either way, this was a completely uncontained mob that needlessly stormed onto the court as soon as the buzzer sounded.
A few weeks back, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, the biggest star in college basketball right now, had a near full-speed collision with an Ohio State fan who wasn’t paying attention after the Buckeyes upset Iowa. Clark was uninjured, but it could have been a lot worse.
That’s now two serious incidents this season. Why wait around for a third?
Security clearly isn’t working. If Wake Forest did have a security plan on Saturday, it didn’t come close to working. Some leagues have adopted fines. The SEC fines schools $100,000 for the first offense, $250,000 for a second offense and $500,000 for the third offense. For league games, the fine goes directly to the school that was “stormed on.” The Pac-12 has a similar system, with $25,000 for a first offense, $50,000 for second and $100,000 for the third offense. The Big East has a $5,000 fine. The Big 12 fined UCF $25,000 following a court storm in January. The ACC, along with the Big Ten, have no known penalty for court storms.
These are half-measures that haven’t worked. This is something that has completely overshadowed Wake Forest’s biggest win in years, a win that likely put the Demon Deacons into the NCAA tournament.
The other side of this argument is that court storms are a uniquely college sports experience, which is a fair argument. But it needs to be done safely. You don’t see it happening in professional sports.
Some have proposed a “court storm timeout” with a couple seconds on the clock to get opposing players off the floor when a court storm is apparent, but that is very tough to enforce when it is a close game, or especially when the game ends on a buzzer-beater. Saturday’s game between Wake Forest and Duke was a close game (83-79 final score), so that likely would not have been possible in this instance.
What more can you do? Financial penalties can be increased, students get in trouble for storming the court and lose their tickets – but that creates a dynamic of “they can’t take tickets away from all of us, right?” – so that probably doesn’t work.
Schools losing home games the following season could be a major disincentive to court storms. That is a major blow to an athletic department’s revenue, especially so if it happens in a football game.
It’s clear that these half-hearted attempts haven’t worked, and now we have had two high-profile examples of star players getting in bad situations in court storms within a few weeks of each other. It shows exactly what can go wrong. We don’t need to wait around for it to happen again. Now is the time to make change.
AJ Hoops 