The University of Maine men’s basketball team headed home from Connecticut on Wednesday after additional testing refuted a previous presumed positive COVID-19 result.
The basketball team had traveled to Mohegan Sun casino on Monday with plans to open its season against Virginia on Wednesday.
Tuesday morning, Maine was removed from the tournament-style format, because a player had tested positive for COVID-19. Tuesday afternoon, the university announced it was pausing all intercollegiate athletic activities at least until Dec. 8 because student-athletes across multiple teams had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.
Before bringing the men’s basketball team back to Maine, university officials decided to have all team members, including staff, retested. Tuesday night, those results all came back negative.
“The player who had a presumed positive was retested. The confirmation test came back negative. There are now no positives in the (men’s basketball) program confirmed by multiple PCR tests,” Tyson McHatten, UMaine’s senior associate director of athletics, said in an email Tuesday evening.
McHatten said Wednesday morning that an additional two presumed positive cases from a different unspecified team have also come back negative after retesting.
However, Maine’s athletic program does have confirmed COVID-19 cases involving student athletes from multiple teams, McHatten said.
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