The United States Air Force Academy Athletics department has announced that all intercollegiate travel is cancelled during the partial government shutdown. That includes for this Saturday’s mega-football game, already a sell-out, against the United States Naval Academy.
At this time, travel for all intercollegiate athletics is cancelled – this includes the Air Force-Navy game on Saturday, 5 Oct.
The Air Force Academy Falcons will attempt to play all home intercollegiate athletic contests but those may be cancelled, as well. Academy officials are working with Mountain West Conference officials, those teams the Falcons were scheduled to play and officials at The Department of the Air Force to make up as many games as possible.
That means that the Air Force women’s trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico to swim against New Mexico is officially on notice – though the AFA gave no indication of how much notice they’d need of a return to full function by the federal government to continue send teams on road trips.
Interestingly, we’ve spoken to those close to at least one of the service academy swim programs, who said that the coaches there are unable to administer practice during the shutdown, but the swimmers are continuing to train without a formal coach.
This rule, apparently, did not apply at least to the Navy football program, who held a regularly schedule practice and spoke with the sports information department afterward on Tuesday.
Other events are starting to be cancelled now as well. Army cancelled their women’s soccer game on Wednesday.
There seems to be conflicting interpretations of the directive from the Department of Defense that cancelled the academies’ intercollegiate athletics, though this has been exceedingly hard for us to clarify, as part of the shutdown has included limitations to the Athletics Department’s communications.
Why? Congress has already approved funding for all military personnel and operations.