The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Matches likely to look different
Should the highest hopes of the Ohio high school soccer community manifest, there will be a full slate of matches this fall.
If it reaches that point, though, perhaps only one thing is for sure: Like it or not, those matches will have to look different than ever before.
Gov. Mike DeWine announced directives for high school sports, including contact sports such as soccer, on Aug. 18. That pronouncement allows fall sports to proceed with caution.
With that hurdle cleared, match day will take on an intriguing form — including fan limits.
“The goal of a coach is to minimize those differences on the field as much as possible,” Geneva boys coach Jeff Hull said. “The tricky thing is going to be the bench. If everybody’s got to stay six feet, your bench is going to go from midfield to the endline. And that’s going to be tricky.
“I’ve seen, when you have guys subbing in, they go to the halfline, and they have to stay six feet as well. If you’re subbing four people in, Player 1 is 24 feet from the other person subbing in. And I get it all the time from refs: ‘He’s not coming in. He wasn’t off the bench when I called him.’ So that will change.”
There are plenty of soccer staples that may have to go by the wayside, at least for a season.
Typically, a prematch talk with a head official involves each side’s head coach and all the side’s captains.
Those not on the pitch are in tight quarters around the bench area.
Groups for rondos — a training drill with passing to work on possession — usually don’t feature six feet between players.
For big matches, international walkouts — in which each side’s starting 11 forms a line behind the officials and proceeds to march to midfield for introductions — are quite popular.
Even aspects such as the amount of ball boys and ball girls and balls that clear the touchline will have to be strongly considered.
“I’m thinking of our field,” Kirtland girls coach Ed Bradac said. “I don’t know how you prevent people from coming in one respect. I think it’s going to be difficult to tell a parent that they can’t watch their child play. That’s going to be a big factor.
“From a safety standpoint,
will it look different? Even the handshake. You won’t see the handshake at the end of the game. That’s the OHSAA putting those rules in place. You’ll see a coach and one captain go out. We’re not going to have any kind of an international introduction. We’re not going to have any of those things.”
Hull had his side, as many have throughout Ohio, go through an intrasquad scrimmage Aug. 6, in part as a test run to see what challenges would be presented with match conditions.
The issue is, though, it doesn’t just begin at midfield at the opening whistle.
“We did it how I thought a regular-season game would go, and it wasn’t all that different, minus, when I’m looking down my bench
to look who’s going to sub in, they’re all six feet apart, and it’s a lot harder to keep tabs on who’s in and who’s not,” Hull said. “But as far as the game play, it was fairly normal.
“How do you get 40 high school boys to wear masks when they step off a soccer field? How do you get them to wear a mask for an hour bus ride? Those are going to be the challenges. Those are going to be the things that are going to feel different. Once they start playing, I think it’s all going to kind of fall into place. We’ve been practicing all summer, and then when August starts, we’re going every day. These kids, they just want to play.”
Regardless of how it may or may not look.
“From my perspective, it won’t look any different at all,” Madison girls coach
Chad Butler said. “I’m so tunnel vision on what’s happening on the field. But I honestly think that the parents, from what I’ve seen so far, to our students and grandparents, players and everything, everyone is just going to be grateful for what we get to see.
“I don’t think it’s going to look like it normally would look with the stands. I find it hard to believe that even if we have spectators, any of our fans will make it to an away match. But we’re really getting to know what matters most. It’s getting a ball out on the field with 22 players and playing.”
Added Bradac: “I don’t think it will impact the kids one way or the other. Kids are so resilient. They’ll be phenomenal with what they’re going to do and how they’re going to play.”