Thursday night football
Four local high school teams will take the field on Thursdays, giving fans a better chance to see them on TV.
Thursday night football has been a success at the college and pro levels. Now it has trickled down to high schools in the Lehigh Valley, and the timing couldn’t be better.
Allen, Dieruff, Whitehall and Emmaus are among four programs whoeach play at least once on Thursday nights this fall in games to be televised by Service Electric, which encourages unlimited viewers, as opposed to the attendance limits imposed by the state during the coronavirus pandemic.
All four originally were scheduled to play this Thursday to kick off the opening weekend of Eastern Pennsylvania Conference play. But the Whitehall-Dieruff game was moved to Saturday night because of a small COVID-19 outbreak at Whitehall last week that forced the school to close until Thursday.
The site of the game also was switched — from J. Birney Crum Stadium to Whitehall — because of a sinkhole problem at J. Birney Crum. Allen will visit Emmausas scheduled. “I think one of the driving forces behind the decision was to allow people to be able to watch their kids in some capacity, knowing that spectators are going to be limited,” Emmaus athletic director Rebecca George said.
Some of the teams would have essentially no chance of getting picked for TV, if limited to Fridays and Saturdays, when the Parklands, Nazareths, Bethlehem Catholics, Eastons and other higher-profile programs regularly are televised.
Last year, Dieruff and Allen combined for five wins. Whitehall went 0-10. Without TV, there are ostensibly two options for fans of those schools this season: Find a way to be one of the few hundred people (including players and team personnel) allowed into each game or wait for the results to trickle in and read about them online or in the newspaper the next day.
Some school districts are now allowing up to 700 fans at football games, up from the 250 mandated by Gov. Wolf’s administration. Allentown School District is allotting two tickets per player, cheerleader and band member. It’s estimated that will equal a crowd of less than 500 to J. Birney Crum Stadium, where Allen and Dieruff play their home games.
Thursday night telecasts will allow fans of those schools to see the games without Service Electric sacrificing the
higher-profile games that fill its schedule each weekend.
“It gives us an opportunity to televise a few more games and open them up to a bigger viewing audience,” Service Electric host Mike Zambelli said. “As you know, not a lot of people are allowed in there, so I think that was part of it. But there were a lot of schools that really weren’t opposed to some Thursday night games, that they really liked the idea. They were thinking about doing it even without our involvement.”
That could be a sign that Thursday night games will remain after the virus is gone or minimized.
But Dieruff athletic director David Stoudt is not so sure.
“Think about this: I played high school football and now watching high school football, I don’t know how some kids will bounce back,” he said. “A kid plays a game up at Pocono Mountain or East Stroudsburg North, then trying to get back to Allentown or back up to Monroe County, getting in at 10:30 at
night and now he’s got to go to school the next day. How is that going to affect things?
“That’s not fun. That’s a tough thing. If they play Friday night, they’re waking up on Saturday, they have that time to recover and relax a little bit in the morning. So that’s another thing that could come into play.”
It won’t be a problem this season because Dieruff and many other schools are operating virtually for at least part of the school week, meaning fewer daily treks to school are required.
But next season, assuming things are back to normal, nobody is quite sure if Thursday nights will work in the long run.
That they work for now is all that matters.
“I think more than anything else, there’s so much uncertainty right now with fans and spectators and family being able to come in and watch their kids play,” Allen athletic director Randy Atiyeh said. “It at least gives them the opportunity to really get to watch their kids’ games and not be cut out completely.
“It creates some challenges on the scheduling side ... but at the end of the day, you know we have to do whatever it takes for us
on our end to be able to provide coverage of our play, but also the chance for the parents to watch them play, which is pretty neat.”
More than one or two Thursdays a season might provide some complications for a school like Allen, Atiyeh cautioned.
“We play our JV games on Mondays,” Atiyeh said. “And at our school, a lot of our JV players tend to double up and play in the varsity game as well. So you’ve really got to be careful that you’re not putting those kids out there to play too many games in a row on short weeks.”
That was why Allen turned down an opportunity for a third Thursday game, Atiyeh said.
Another potential obstacle: Pushback from coaches.
“Coaches are very regimented and they like set schedules,” George said. “But if they know far enough in advance, they can pre-plan for games that fall on different nights.”
So the jury remains out on what will become an important trial run.
“Do we know if we like it? We don’t know if we like it totally yet because we haven’t seen it happen yet,” Stoudt said. “So we’ll see how this year goes.”