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Amid a Local Outbreak, a Historically Black University Cancels Basketball Season

Robert Franklin/Associated Press

The women’s basketball team at Bethune-Cookman University conducted an ordinary practice on Monday morning. The coaches spent time reviewing the fundamentals of the pack-line defense, testing the players’ knowledge of different sets. They proceeded with a lengthy scrimmage.

As it turned out, the practice will be the team’s last for 2020-21. When the players convened next, on a hastily arranged conference call that afternoon, they learned their season was over.

Bethune-Cookman, a historically Black university in Daytona Beach, Fla., became the first Division I school to cancel sports for the rest of the academic year because of the coronavirus pandemic.