University of Nevada basketball shares its home arena with a large group of bats. Head coach Steve Alford is exhausted by repeated run-ins with the flying mammal.
He hit his wits end during the Wolfpack’s season-opener on Tuesday night with a passionate plea for the most reasonable of requests. Alford just wants the bats to be removed. That’s all!
The bat thing is getting pretty embarrassing and it needs to be fixed. It’s uncalled for.
We are a big-time basketball program and we shouldn’t be dealing with… bats.
We shouldn’t have a stoppage of play because we’re dealing with diving bats.
— Steve Alford
His exasperated rant came after Nevada defeated Sacramento State by 14 to begin the 2023 season. The result was everything that Alford could have hoped for. It just just took longer than expected.
A lengthy stoppage occurred about midway through the second half.
Multiple bats began to fly around the court and forced the game to come to a halt once they started swooping in over the hardwood. Some of the players had to dodge the bats as they swirled around their heads.
It appeared to be three or four of them. However, the Nevada Department of Wildlife confirmed that there could be up to 30 bats living inside the arena in 2017. Gross.
Players were removed from the court as a group of staff members tried to clear things up. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful at first, but the bats eventually got the memo.
— Andrew Nepsund (@AndrewNepsundTV) November 8, 2023
The whole thing was pretty hilarious from an outsider’s perspective. Bat delays, so long as no one gets bit, are really funny.
Those same thoughts are not shared by Alford. He has been at Nevada since 2019. There have been multiple bat delays. Social media has repeatedly joked about the bats.
All of that hurts the Wolfpack in the end. Alford is begging for the bats to be removed from the basketball arena, which is such a fair ask for a college basketball coach.
And yet, for whatever reason, the bats have lived at Lawlor Events Center for at least six years now but nobody at Nevada has thought to eradicate them from the stadium. At this point, it’s tradition!