Better to have basketball with masks than not at all
One of the refs took a practice puff on his whistle from underneath a giant black mask. It sounded a little like a warbling canary being strangled by a bed sheet. He laughed. I laughed. We were all just happy to be here.
“It’s gone by so fast,” D’Evelyn guard Lexi Szathmary said, neatly summing up the last 10 months for basketball and beyond. “At the same time, it’s gone by pretty slow.”
Monday went by fast. Too fast.
Szathmary’s Jaguars stomped Heritage at home, 44-11, in the girls basketball season-opener for both schools and the first local contest of CHSAA’s COVID-shortened 2021 slate.
“It’s just different, before free throws, not to hear people saying your name,” D’Evelyn forward Chloe Klataske chuckled after a game in which everybody — including the players — wore masks. “We were trying to keep it loud, but it’s hard when there’s like six people and you just keep repeating the same thing.”
In a gym that seats up to 1,400 people, backpacks outnumbered bodies in the bleachers. Besides the two teams and masked administrators, we counted three folks working video cameras; two folks doing stats; the official
scorer; and a kid from the yearbook.
Official attendance: Nada.
“Honestly, the pregame was the weirdest,” Jags coach Chris Olson said. “The setting up and making sure you’ve got the chairs spaced, and who’s got the disinfectant, where are the wipes, all that stuff. Honestly, once the ball tips, it’s playing basketball.”
The masked Jags played it as per usual — with the gas petal stomped all the way to the floor. D’Evelyn opened in a full-court press, jostling the Eagles enough to build up a 10-0 lead about three minutes into the game. After about five minutes, the cushion was 15-0.
The rest was academic. Eerily quiet. But academic.
“I was pretty happy (Monday) with our energy,” Olson said. “I asked the girls at halftime, ‘Are you guys breathing OK?’ And all of them said, ‘Yeah.’ It (stinks). It’s hard. But they’re able to do it and again, like the kids said, the alternative is don’t play or miss the entire season. We’d much rather play.”
Colorado is one of only four states, along with Minnesota, Virginia and North Carolina, to mandate player masks during basketball games. Most of the Jags wore the disposable types, save for guard Megan “Zip” Stein, who sported a thick, black Under Armour model.
“I just like it better,” Stein explained. “I haven’t actually tried the surgical mask. This one doesn’t feel like I’m actually breathing into the mask. It covers my face, but it doesn’t feel like I’m breathing in the cloth.”
To remedy the conditions some, officials called an administrative timeout — for rest and water breaks — approximately halfway through each 8minute period. So that was new. So, too, was the constant quiet, breaks that sounded as if someone had hit the pause button on a tape loop of ambient noise.
One of those pauses came early, during the awkward gap where the National Anthem was supposed to be. The Jags stood in a reverent semi-circle, waiting for the canned music to start. One second became a strange three. Then a surreal five. Then an uncomfortable eight.
“It’s not gonna work,” D’Evelyn athletic director Jerry McWhorter called out from the storage gym. “Let’s play. Or sing.”
The officials elected to play, quickly calling for the two teams to tip. Within the next two minutes, sure enough, the soft strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” began playing, soflty, over the public address system:
Ohhhh say can you see … … then faded out. Everybody had a little rust to shake off. Some even had blood. With about 5:24 left in the third period, Klataske took a shot to the noggin. She couldn’t tell if it was an elbow or a knee. But she knew it was thrust upward. And it hurt like holy heck.
“It wasn’t flowing out,” the junior D’Evelyn forward recalled. “So it was good.”
Did we mention that Klataske is also asthmatic? When she’s not battling for a loose ball, she’s fighting, through a mask, for every breath.
“I never really quite got used to it,” Klataske explained, “because it’s just like you’re breathing your old air. And it’s five times hotter with a mask. It’s really sweaty.”
But better blood, and sweat, than nothing at all.
“So glad we had a season,” Stein said softly. Beneath all that protection, her dimples gave a smile away. “So glad.”