Citrus League teams dive cautiously into 2020 season
When the FHSAA’s board of directors voted to resume high school sports seasons on Sept. 4 after nearly half a year without competition, it was clear that was just a target date, not a mandate for schools grappling with how to safely reopen their campuses in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The Florida High School Athletic Association assured member schools that they could create regular-season schedules to best suit their situations.
Six area private schools chose to start their football seasons right away on that date, some with trepidation and all with special protocols designed to reduce the likelihood of having players contract the coronavirus and spreading the infection. Still, at least several of those teams have had COVID-related issues and Foundation Academy canceled one football game.
Six other private schools that formed The Citrus League as partners opted to be more cautious.
Four of the league’s five football playing schools — The First Academy, Lake Highland Prep, Trinity Prep and Windermere Prep — have yet to play a game. All four will kick off their 2020 schedules seven weeks later than originally planned in a specially scheduled doubleheader on Friday night at the Austin-Tindall Sports Complex off Boggy Creek Road in Osceola County.
They are four weeks behind some teams but hopeful that what they have seen and heard about going into Week 5 of the FHSAA’s revamped football calendar will help them keep their teams healthy and on the field of play.
“There’s no right way or wrong way because all of this is so new to all of the schools in the area,” TFA athletic director Will Cohen said Monday during a Zoom meeting for Citrus League athletic directors.
That meeting has been a daily group conversation among the league’s six athletic directors for several months.
“We’ve been a little slower starting things and one reason for that is when we started we wanted to make sure we could keep going and hopefully complete our seasons,” Cohen said. “We wanted to be ultra conservative and be able to get as much data as we could before our teams played.”
Some of the feedback has come from Bishop Moore A.D. Mike Malatesta. The Hornets play larger schools in football than the other teams and kicked off their season two weeks ago.
The Hornets allowed limited attendance, two tickets per athlete, for their home opener against Jones and have the same guideline for other sports. They allow cheerleaders and the band to perform at home football games.
“So far, so good,” Malatesta said. “Overall, things have gone really well.”
Montverde Academy, which does not have football, is the sixth member of a league that has an exclusive scheduling agreement for the other fall sports: girls volleyball, bowling, cross country, golf and swimming and diving.
The idea is that each member school will abide by the same coronavirus protocols and exposure to COVID risk will be lessened for the teams that compete only against league members.
In volleyball, for instance, all six teams will play twice against the same opponent next week, with Lake Highland going against TFA, Trinity Prep taking on Bishop Moore, and Windermere Prep playing Montverde in homeand-away matches.
The league set up similar rotations for the other fall sports after forming a medical expert team that included athletic trainers and sports doctors from all six schools.
“It’s been a great coordination to have the medical experts,” said Lake Highland A.D. Charmaine Schreiber. “Our primary goal was to get school started and up and running before we started our sports seasons.”
Friday’s football event will include senior night festivities for all four teams, which highly likely marks the first time any of the schools have recognized their 12th-grade players in a season opener.
Lake Highland will play Trinity Prep at 5 and TFA is set to play Windermere Prep at approximately 8 p.m.
“When we looked at starting football we wanted to insure that we could have a senior night for the four schools,” said Trinity Prep A.D. Dave Langdon. “This was a chance to get all four teams into a bigger facility.”
That allows for much more space for spectators at the spacious Austin-Tindall park, even with COVID-19 limitations in place.
“Austin-Tindall allows all of the schools to bring our bands, cheerleading squads and all of our parents,” Cohen said. “They have a great process in place to have everything cleaned between games.”
The plan is to recognize LHP and Trinity Prep seniors at halftime of their game and do the same for TFA and Windermere Prep seniors at about 7:30 prior to their kickoff. The stadium will be cleared between games so the social-distancing guidelines can be followed.
A number of area schools have placed senior festivities for football and other sports early in the season for fear that if they wait those events could be wiped out by coronavirus issues. That’s exactly what happened to spring sports when schools were shut down in March due to the outbreak.
Bishop Moore is holding its volleyball senior night on Thursday and will play its senior night football game against Harmony on Oct. 9.
The four teams that play Friday will become familiar foes. They will each play the other three teams twice this year to fill out a six-game regular-season schedule.
That’s another oddity. Playing one football team twice in a regular season is unusual, much less three. But strange times call for strange schedules. And daily video conference calls seem to be working for this league.