Lorain providing weekly COVID tests

After canceling its entire 2020 fall sports season, Lorain High School wanted to take that time to work on a plan to make sure it didn’t have to do the same to its winter season.

What is that plan? Testing athletes weekly in an attempt to catch potential outbreaks before they happen. So far, it’s worked for the dozens of student-athletes at Lorain and their families.

“It’s a huge benefit. I’ve had numerous parents come to me and say how appreciative they were of the fact that we were doing this testing,” Lorain athletic director Bryan Koury said. “They wish that their kids will be able to do it, even when the basketball season or wrestling season or bowling season’s over.”

Lorain’s decision to cancel its fall season, including its football and volleyball seasons, stemmed from what CEO Jeff Graham said was a lack of a way to keep children from spreading the virus to each other and then to their families.

In weekly testing, Lorain hopes it has found that way.

“The rationale for our decision to cancel the fall season was … to protect our players, but we all know the kids are a lot less vulnerable than the adults,” Koury said. “The last thing in the world that we wanted to see happen was have one of our athletes get COVID and spread it among the team and have that team take it home to vulnerable family members.”

It has worked so far, as Lorain has been able to avoid any kind of major outbreak among its teams. Outside of a scattering of cases among its programs, most notably its girls basketball program, Lorain has had no issue with cases.

And even in those cases, the tests were able to catch the positive tests before the virus spread to other players and potentially their families.

“The fact that we were able to figure out a way to test and potentially catch it early enough to where that spread among the team and then to families was much less likely,”

Koury said. “I think it made everybody a lot more comfortable.

“(Parents) fear is that their kids are asymptomatic and are going to not know that they have it and bring it home and again, spread it among your family. So the program has been very successful in being able to keep our families safe.”

Nov. 24, the district made the decision to pause its athletics (excluding bowling) until Dec. 11. According to Koury the decision was made, not due to any circumstances within Lorain, but because a majority of the Titans’ upcoming opponents have already made the decision to postpone until December.

Some schools, such as Lake Erie League foe Warrensville Heights, have gone further, announcing they have paused athletics until January.

The next Lorain boys basketball game was set for Dec. 10 at home against Shaw, while the girls were scheduled to return to competition Dec. 12. The girls team returned to practice Nov. 13 after a two-week quarantine and have had one scrimmage this offseason.