Distanced Wrestling?
FUTURE generations will look back with disbelief at the suffering America’s schoolchildren endured because of the destructive decisions educators made. School closings and the stubborn refusal of teachers unions and administrators to abandon remote instruction long after it was clear the pandemic’s danger to kids was minimal have caused untold, impossible-to-undo damage to millions of children in lost years of learning and development.
In this context, what’s happening to New York City’s high-school wrestlers may not be the worst instance of COVID-inspired insanity. But the rules the Public Schools Athletic League has imposed on its competitions must rank among the most absurd in a long list of institutional nonsense.
Even now, after much of the country has been vaccinated and the worst of the virus is behind us, the educational establishment is still caught up in COVID hysteria. It’s been forcing small children who are at little to no risk from the disease to wear masks and eat lunch sitting on the ground outside in cold temperatures, sometimes even forbidding them to talk during the break.
Just look at the restrictions that PSAL has cooked up for the hardworking athletes who are competitive high-school wrestlers.
The league has determined that anyone who wrestles must be vaccinated. Vaccinations are a good thing. But inflexible mandates forcing children to be immunized for a disease that has been shown to have little impact on physically fit kids like wrestlers can’t be justified.
But simply being vaccinated is not enough. The PSAL also says wrestling activities must always be conducted with masks while observing social-distancing rules.
How anyone can wrestle while complying with social-distancing rules is a mystery for which neither the PSAL Web site nor inquiries to officials offer much of a clue.
The mask mandate is equally ridiculous. It’s not just that requiring masks on at all times makes no sense in a sport where close physical contact can’t be avoided. Enforcing this in wrestling when there are no timeouts during competition is nearly impossible.
Even more important, requiring wrestlers, who engage in bouts that are essentially three two-minute sprints, to have their mouths and noses covered makes it hard for the kids to breathe. That raises more serious health concerns than the minimal theoretical threat from COVID.
Still, the students to whom the chance to succeed in the sport means everything are willing to put up with these idiotic rules if it means they can contend after losing a year of competition to the pandemic. But that’s not the end of PSAL’s COVID craziness.
New York City’s vaccine-mandate rules mean that high-school wrestlers can’t take part in tournaments, including state championships, since kids from private and parochial schools — which don’t impose these rules on their students — will be present. The same applies to out-of-state competitions involving athletes from jurisdictions less addicted to COVID fear than New York.
So the city’s high-school wrestlers, who are already dealing with shortened competitive schedules because many students dropped out of the sport rather than deal with these ridiculous regulations, are losing out on their chance to shine under the tournament spotlight. That will lessen the chance of many of them to not just gain the glory they’ve worked so hard for but also get college scholarships that would enable them to continue their education.
The kids are the big losers here. In a sane world, the PSAL would find ways to carve out exceptions to bad rules that do nothing to save lives while inflicting hardship. Instead, we live in a world where teachers unions use their enormous political power to force compliance with regulations that make no sense.
If Mayor-elect Eric Adams wants to show he’s willing to listen to reason rather than let student athletes suffer due to science-free pandemic hysteria, he won’t wait until he’s inaugurated to reach out to the PSAL to start using his influence to end this madness.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org.