No one was safe from Winter Storm Jonas, as the historic blizzard crippled the East Coast with over three feet of snow in some areas. Cities were brought to a standstill, power outages were frequent and daily life was forced to take some time off. NYU Athletics was no different, as a number of events were postponed or canceled, causing a bit of chaos for the student athletes who will now be forced to further balance their academics with an unpredictable sports calendar.

• Men’s and women’s swimming and diving, winning the award for best foresight, delayed their scheduled Saturday road trip to West Chester, Pennsylvania two days before the heart of the storm crushed the area. Their meet against West Chester University has now been pushed to this upcoming Saturday.
• As the storm picked up in intensity Saturday afternoon, the decision was finally made to cancel the NYU/St. John’s Fencing Invitational. The men and women are next scheduled to compete on Saturday, Jan. 30 as Brandeis University hosts the Eric Sollee Invitational. A new date against St. John’s has not yet been set.
• After initially moving their scheduled Saturday meet a day later to Sunday, NYU’s wrestling team was also forced to cancel their quad meet against a slate of other teams. While the squad is preparing to face Johns Hopkins University this Saturday, Jan. 30, the new date for the quad meet has yet to be determined.

Track and field was able to complete its Friday action in Staten Island at the Gotham Cup while other teams — such as hockey, men’s and women’s basketball and men’s volleyball — were fortunate to be on the road away from the storm. However, Jonas still threw some wrinkles into their travel plans.

Discovering on Saturday that their flight home from St. Louis was cancelled, the basketball teams were forced to travel home by bus. According to men’s senior guard Max Ralby, the teams had still not arrived home by early Monday.

“After our Sunday game we bussed to Newark, Ohio where we stayed over night,” Ralby said, as the teams were just beginning the second leg of the ride home.

The hockey and volleyball teams were a bit luckier. Not only did the volleyball team get to enjoy the relative warmth of California, but they also had a painless flight back to New York. For athletes such as senior middle hitter Phil Bueno, the trip home was easier than expected.

“Surprisingly we weren’t delayed at all flying from LAX to JFK,” Bueno said.

The same can be said for head coach Chris Cosentino’s hockey team, as the road home from upstate New York was free of almost all other vehicles.

“We were pretty lucky — we left Friday afternoon for Albany before any snowfall in NYC,” Cosentino said. “It did not snow in Albany while we were there for our games against Siena and RPI. We left the hotel at 8 a.m. on Sunday with no traffic back to NYC.”
While some had better luck than others, a forecast currently predicting clear skies for this weekend assures that NYU sports and the entire East Coast will return to some level of normalcy in the coming days.

Email Michael Thompson at [email protected].