AIA: HS athletes won’t need masks
Arizona high school basketball and soccer players, along with wrestlers, won’t have to wear masks during competition starting next week when the postseason begins.
Spring sports athletes also won’t have to wear masks while competing.
However, masks still will be required for student athletes while they are not actively competing.
The Arizona Interscholastic Association Executive Board approved the removal of the in-competition mask mandate on Tuesday morning for the start of the winter sports playoffs and all of the spring sports season.
Officials working the games or matches also won’t have to wear masks.
The decision comes after concerns have been raised by some coaches and others about challenges young athletes have had wearing masks while competing, along with inconsistent enforcement.
“The one group most consistent wearing masks, monitoring it, has been wrestling,” AIA Executive Director David Hines said. “And those numbers are not high at all. In fact, they’re very low.
“But because of the headgear, they’re able to keep the masks in place a little bit better than some of the other athletes.”
Spring sports competition includes baseball, softball, track and field, boys volleyball and girls sand volleyball. Competition begins March 12. The sports were allowed to begin practices on Monday.
The board initially approved a motion to remove the in-competition masks for spring outdoor sports, such as baseball, softball, track and field, sand volleyball, tennis and golf, but keep the mask mandate in place for boys volleyball during competition because it’s played inside, but that later also was included.
The board was then set to approve the motion to keep the winter sports athletes all in masks during competition for the remainder of the season and playoffs, before board member Jim Dean presented the motion to stop the mask mandate for winter sports competition
The board voted 6-3 to end the ingame mask mandate starting with the winter sports postseason, although Chandler Unified School District Superintendent Camille Casteel suggested ending the mandate immediately.
Dean said would be better to wait another week to remove the mandate.
“I remain incredibly concerned about the inconsistent enforcement (of masks in competition). It’s impacting games,” Dean said. “You have highachieving teams playing in games that are officiated with the masks one way, then the next game they’re playing in a game in which athletes are being sent out of the game on a regular basis.
“Going into the playoffs, that inconsistency can impact the outcome of the game. I remain very concerned about that as we move forward.”
Board member Jim Love said that if the winter sports mask mandate was being dropped with the start of postseason play, then boys volleyball players shouldn’t be forced to wear masks in competition.
“Now I don’t understand,” Love said in the meeting. “Indoor volleyball is going to have to wear masks and now you’re going to let the wrestlers be indoors hugging each other not having to be in masks. Is that fair?”
The motion to allow for boys volleyball to remove the masks in competition was passed.
AIA spring high school sports competition was canceled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decision to ease the mask requirement comes as Arizona has seen a decline in the number of average daily COVID-19 cases reported by state officials over the past several weeks. At the same time, the number of people being vaccinated has increased.
Arizona State women’s basketball isn’t looking backwards to make up some of its seven postponed games.
But the Sun Devils are looking ahead, not only to the Pac-12 Tournament this week but potentially to the WNIT to get more experience for a roster with only one senior.
After upsetting then No. 9 (now 11) Arizona on Sunday, ASU hopes for at least a two-game Pac-12 run in Las Vegas and a seventh consecutive postseason appearance.
“This is a super young team that would benefit from any postseason experience,” ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said. “It would be fantastic to get a bid to either tournament. We would welcome that.”
The Sun Devils (11-9) would need another major upset or two in Vegas to even get onto the NCAA Tournament bubble. But with their NCAA pedigree, they would be attractive to the WNIT, which this season is cutting back from 64 to 32 teams due to COVID with eight teams playing at four regional sites leading to a final four.
ASU has made five WNIT appearances during Turner Thorne’s tenure, most recently in 2012 when she was on a one-year sabbatical.
“These are young kids that haven’t been there and done it,” she said. “It’s the same timeline as the NCAA. We play through March, that’s our program, that’s what we do. To have that opportunity for this team would be invaluable.”
First, the No. 9-seeded Sun Devils will try to win a season series tiebreaker against No. 8 USC (10-11) in a Pac-12 Tournament first round game Wednesday.
ASU won the first meeting 63-58 on Dec. 4 then the Trojans prevailed 6557 on Jan. 31.
In the second meeting in Los Angeles, the Sun Devils were coming off a hard fought 60-57 loss at now No. 9 UCLA while USC played just one game that week due to Arizona COVID-19 issues.
“They’re as talented offensively as any team that we play in the Pac-12,” Turner Thorne said. “There’s not anybody we don’t have to guard. They’re challenging. We can do everything better. We didn’t do anything well the last time we played them. That’s the good news, but we don’t have a lot of prep time.”
USC guard Endyia Rogers scored 30 points against ASU in 2019-20 and again this season in the second game. The Trojans, on a three-game losing streak, also have post presence in forwards Alissa Pili and 6-2 Jordyn Jenkins and 6-5 center Angel Jackson.
Jaddan Simmons, named Pac-12 Freshman of the Week on Monday, scored 20 points against USC in the first meeting and 16 in the second.
Turner Thorne believes momentum from the UA win will help her team, which hasn’t pieced consecutive wins together since a three-game streak from Dec. 13-Jan. 1.
“Having confidence and learning how to sustain their effort and keep that perseverance is everything,” she said. “If this (UA) game can help with that, I think we can make a good run. We haven’t done that. That’s our big challenge going into March.”
The ASU-USC winner will face Pac-12 regular season champion/No. 4-ranked Stanford (22-2) on Thursday. The tournament continues through Sunday.
ASU leading scorer Taya Hanson was named All Pac-12 honorable mention Monday, decided in voting by league coaches.
She also made all-defensive honorable mention.
Up next
USC vs. Arizona State, 3 p.m. Wednesday, Mandalay Bay Events Center, Las Vegas, Pac-12 Network, KDUS (1060 AM) — ASU (11-9) and USC (10-11) split regular season games with each winning at home. The Sun Devils are coming off an upset of then No. 9 Arizona on Sunday while the Trojans have lost three straight by an average of 30.3 points.
At the 2020 Pac-12 Tournament, ASU was upset in the first round by California then COVID-19 forced cancellation of the NCAA Tournament.