No sports, no student sections: Carolina Fever talks point standings, impact of COVID-19

Despite COVID-19 canceling sports for the foreseeable future, UNC students don’t need to be worried about their Carolina Fever points.

Carolina Fever is a student-led rewards program that provides incentives for students to attend UNC sporting events. The program awards the top 150 point-earners with two tickets to every home basketball game with the exception of the Duke game, where students get one ticket. This past season, the top 200 students also received a ticket to every home football game.

Each year students' points reset after the last men’s basketball home game. With the NCAA cutting the spring season short due to COVID-19 concerns, 13 planned events were cut from the Carolina Fever game roster. 

“We've never really come across a time when we’re without sports," Carolina Fever co-chairperson Will Burton, a junior, said.

Senior Peyton Collete, a former Carolina Fever co-chairperson, said COVID-19 is uncharted territory, going back to the program's creation in the 1980s.

“We’re still thinking about how to operate during this time, because our whole plan revolves around the sporting events which have been cancelled for the foreseeable future,” Collete said.

Students like sophomore Kelly Pham are worried that they won’t be able to go to enough fall sporting events to be in the running for highly-coveted basketball tickets or recently in-demand football tickets.

“I might be at a disadvantage in the fall, because I won’t be able to attend a good amount of the events,” Pham said. “It’s a larger pool of people I’m going against. Last time I had the spring points to lean back on, but this time I won’t.”

But senior Jessica Hamilton, a former Carolina Fever co-chairperson, said coronavirus shouldn’t impact the point standings for the 2020-2021 school year.

“In the long run, it won’t really affect standings this year because everyone is experiencing the same point losses for the season,” she said. “The total number for the top 150 point-earners will be less overall. It’s not really about a certain number of points because the whole scale of points will be less.”

Burton said there’s no need to worry about missing out on point opportunities. The Carolina Fever committee is also thinking of ways to still reward points this semester. Some possibilities include holding virtual watch parties during ACC Network replays of games, or holding a trivia night to keep students engaged.

“Our mission is to still support UNC athletics during the pandemic,” Burton said.

“As far as my experience with Carolina Fever, we’ve never had anything like this," he said. "You can make comparisons to the hurricane, the snowstorms that cancel class, or even the water break — during all those times, we’ve had sports. This has been a new challenge for us all, and I think new creative ideas will come from it.”

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