FILE — NCAA Season 95 opening. INQUIRER PHOTO/TRISTAN TAMAYO
MANILA, Philippines — The NCAA is leaning toward a no vaccine, no participation policy for athletes as it plans to push through with its 96th season this month.
The new season is scheduled to get underway on June 13 with online chess, poems, speed kicking in taekwondo among the events featured in this year’s calendar of events as well as skills challenges in both basketball and volleyball if the league gets approval from the Inter-Agency Task Force and Commission on Higher Education.
“We recognize the rights of the students to choose if they want to be vaccinated or not. But we also have to consider the rights of the other students who want to be vaccinated,” said NCAA Management Committee chair Fr. Vic Calvo on Tuesday during the PSA Forum.
“We’re discussing [it] right now and we’re geared towards including vaccination in the eligibility requirements of the athletes.”
Calvo added the NCAA respects everyone’s right as far as the vaccination is concerned but the athletes are encouraged to get inoculated against COVID-19.
“That’s why we’re pushing our vaccination information campaign to lessen the hesitancy of the players,” said Calvo in Filipino.
Calvo had said last March that the NCAA is looking at procuring vaccines for its student-athletes through Dr. Jose Paolo Campos of Emilio Aguinaldo College, whose family partly owns pharmaceutical company Unilab which signed an agreement with the distributor of Covavax jabs in the country.