Sports World Sadly Not Immune from Shooting Tragedies: A Strategy for Active Shooter Scenarios

Sunday night’s tragic shooting that claimed the lives of three University of Virginia football players offered a stark and chilling reminder that the sports world is not immune from horrific and heartbreaking events. As my Workplace Safety colleagues recently noted in a helpful Insight, “an active shooting event can occur almost anywhere.” We now know that can be true in the athletics world. This quick Insight will provide resources that sports organizations can adopt in order to prepare for the unthinkable, including a four-step plan you can put into place today.

The news that unfolded late last night and today is almost inconceivable. A former University of Virginia football player is suspected of killing three current athletes and wounding two other students on campus late Sunday night after a charter bus returned from a student field trip. The shooter is in custody after a manhunt in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has been charged with three counts of second-degree murder among other criminal charges.

It should serve as a wake-up call to your organization – whether an athletics department, a professional franchise, a club team, or some other sports-affiliated group – that you are not immune from the tragedies that can unfold in our modern society. We recommend that you review this insightful piece developed by our Workplace Safety Team that offers a four-step plan to prepare for and deal with a potential active shooter situation.

We recommend you adapt it for your organization, keeping in mind all of the individuals your organization deals with on a regular basis. To the extent you have athletes on premises who are not employees, you may want to work in a training session on at least an annual basis to cover some of these basics. To the extent you have crowd control personnel supervising attendees of your events, they should be trained on these methods as well.

We’ll continue to monitor developments in this area and provide updates as warranted. Make sure you are subscribed to the Fisher Phillips Insight service to ensure you receive the latest news directly to your inbox. For further information, contact your Fisher Phillips attorney, the author of this Insight, or any member of our Sports Industry Practice Group.