‘ALL FOR THE KIDS’
Getting back to normal is the goal, flexibility the key for a return to high school sports
Brookfield athletic director Steve Baldwin spent his Tuesday surveying his athletes and coaches at a number of different practices throughout the afternoon.
In a word, Baldwin said he was “ecstatic” just standing around and making routine check-ins with his students and staff.
They were masked, following state guidelines. But that didn’t conceal his players’ joy after being away from each other for so long.
“It was just so awesome,” Baldwin said Tuesday, the first day back at school and gyms across the state in more than two months. “Just being able to look at a kid and talk and joke with them. As great as technology has been, it’s just nothing like the real thing.”
Down the road in Weston, athletic director Mark Berkowitz was feeling the same. He said his office was a flurry of athletes submitting paperwork necessary to compete in the new and approved winter high school sports season. “The office was a bit crazy,” he said. “But it was a good crazy.”
The pandemic, which has transformed the conduct of high school sports across the country, is far from over. Nevertheless, the state forged ahead with the launching of the 2021 winter season Tuesday, the second under the strict protocols of COVID-19 mitigation.
The rules, which include mandatory masks, adequate social distancing inside natatoriums, rinks and gymnasiums, and adequate sanitation, not to mention scaled back competitions and the excising of state championships, are now a way of life for the foreseeable future.
But athletic directors say their players and coaches are more than happy to oblige, as long as they get to compete in the games they love and return to their pre-pandemic routines.
That’s the long-term goal for this winter season and for as long as the pandemic continues, even if it spills into 2022, which a number of officials are expecting.
“Just getting back to normal, that’s it,” Baldwin said. “Kids don’t need anything else right now but normal. We want kids to have their lives back.”
ADs say the biggest difference between now and the fall, when the first high school games were played in the pandemic, is familiarity and understanding of what may lie ahead. Teams must be monitored for any potential cases and, when issues arise, schedules
need to be adjusted and games potentially canceled or opponents changed.
“Every day was a challenge,” Berkowitz said. “A difficult challenge.”
“It really forced us to become more flexible in how we do business,” said Norwalk athletic director Doug Marchetti, whose school district remains on pause for at least another week as officials there work to approve winter play.
“You’re constantly asking yourself, ‘Can I get through this week or the next day? It’s forced us to say, if we need to make changes, we’ll make changes on the fly. You portray that to your coaches, too.”
Marchetti, who also teaches three classes at Norwalk, has learned to be understanding and flexible with assignments for students who have unexpected new responsibilities thrust upon them at home.
That, he says, has carried over to his athletics program and to team parents, as well.
The FCIAC, of which Norwalk is a part, won’t be allowing fans to attend games this winter. The league is also eliminating the typical subvarsityvarsity basketball tripleheaders to counterweight a shortage of officials. The league will continue to alternate playing days with the neighboring SWC.
Berkowitz, who also serves as
the co-commissioner for the SWC, said the league is allowing home fans to attend games, although that policy will vary between school districts. No away fans will be allowed, he said.
A number of schools will continue to rely on different livestream companies to give parents and fans a chance to watch like they did in the fall.
None of this is ideal, ADs say. But the CIAC’s release promising fall contact tracing data which noted just seven athletes contracting COVID-19 over 8,296 games played and an estimated 25,000 practices, proves high school sports can be played safely and without
fear going forward.
“We proved to ourselves we can do this,” Berkowitz said. “We just have to remain consistent and on top of things. We’re doing this for all the right reasons and it’s all for the kids. It’s worthwhile and it’s possible.”
The promise of more widespread vaccinations in the near future gives ADs hope that the spring season, which was eliminated in its entirety last year, will be conducted as close to normal as possible.
Just how “normal” the spring season will look is anyone’s guess.
“That’s the $64,000 question and that’s what we have to start discussing,” said Al Carbone, the commissioner of the Southern Connecticut Conference. “We hope winter goes well, and when we go back outside for spring, we know we can do a lot more different things than indoors. We’ll have more leeway.”
Optimism is high that the spring, which is played outdoors and in warmer weather, will be played with a complete schedule and include the first state tournaments since Fall 2019.
“I just spoke to a parent about that this evening,” Berkowitz said. “I feel real confident in the spring. In the fall, we just played in local divisions. In the winter, we’re able to play more in our conferences, but not going across the state. I think by the time we get to spring, I really believe by May and June — the time tournaments come around — it’ll look a lot more like normal play.”
As with football and wrestling, boys lacrosse remains on the National Federation of High School Association’s list of “high risk” sports and the Connecticut Dept. of Health is prohibiting its play. But Berkowitz said there has already been intense lobbying for the NFHS to reconsider that classification.
“There’s contact, but it’s not much different than soccer,” he said. “We just got done with a soccer season that was very safe. There was not one case of COVID passed from team to team.
A yearlong evolution of public understanding on how the disease transmits has helped change perceptions.
“You think about what people have been going through over the last year. People were thinking that we’d never get to play sports,” Carbone said. “We learned from the fall that every single day you need to be flexible, but we learned how to do it. We learned that we have to trust we can do things safely and that kids are part of that solution.”
One aspect that ADs weren’t so sure about is how long the COVID restrictions would last, and how much there would be by the time fall returns. Carbone said he could see football — Connecticut was one of 15 states that didn’t play a 11-vs.-11 season — returning, but with some of the usual mitigation strategies still in place.
Berkowitz said he could see masks, distancing and sanitizing becoming part of the daily routine at least until next year.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t have all of school back,” he said. “I’m OK with it if it means teenagers who so desperately need to socialize can socialize and be teenagers.”