Teams to resume practices this week

It has been one year, seven months and 29 days since the last, official high school football game was played in Connecticut.

That’s six hundred and six days since Jack Street’s 36-yard touchdown pass dropped into the open arms of Riley Ward to give Newtown a glorious, 13-7 walkoff victory over Darien in the Class LL championship game.

It’s been 520 days since the COVID-19 pandemic officially struck Connecticut with the CIAC’s cancelation of the winter sports tournaments.

It’s been 342 days since the CIAC ultimately canceled the 2020 high school football season. And it’s been another 210 days since the CIAC canceled plans for an alternative spring season.

But who’s counting? Every high school football coach, parent and player from Greenwich to Plainfield and Enfield to Stonington, that’s who.

“I’m counting the seconds,” Trumbull coach Marce Petroccio said. “I can’t wait to get back to playing real, normal foot

ball again. My kids have waited a long time and have worked hard in the weight room. We cannot wait to get going.”

Their 20-month-long nightmare is, at last, nearing an end.

Thursday marks the beginning of the first CIAC 11 vs. 11 high school football season since December 14, 2019.

There will be no more 7-vs-7 passing leagues and lineman challenges — which is what high school football was reduced to last autumn.

After an initial three days of “organized team activities” (or OTAs), another five days of mandatory conditioning practices, and then another 19 days of contact practice and a handful of scrimmages, an actual, physical high school football season is set to kick off the weekend of Sept. 10.

“We are going to play,” CIAC executive director Glenn Lungarini declared on Tuesday. “OTAs start Thursday. We start conditioning week on Monday and we’re ready to go. We’re looking forward to this year.”

Those should be welcomed words to players and coaches across the state, many of whom blamed Lungarini and the CIAC to varying degrees for the cancelation of the 2020

season in Connecticut.

While they’re thrilled to finally get started again after nearly two years, many of those coaches also expressed some apprehension about actually playing this season, especially with COVID-19 cases back on the rise a month before school starts.

“Every program, after 21 months of no football, I don’t know how you could possibly not be excited to get started again,” said Ansonia coach and athletic director Tom Brockett said. “There’s still a fear of the unknown. After what happened last year — the high school coaches and kids did everything right, and still had the rug pulled out from under them — you just want to move forward and play a full season and get things back to normal as quickly as possible. The kids need it.”

Lungarini says he’s convinced football will be played unimpeded by COVID issues mainly because of almost two year’s worth of accumulated knowledge about COVID-19 transmission and mitigation and — of course — the vaccines, which weren’t widespread until the summer.

The CIAC and Connecticut Dept. of Health issued a joint statement July 21 encouraging all athletes to get vaccinated this season and Lungarini reiterated that point on Tuesday. “The best mitigation strategy we can take is to encourage those who are eligible to get vaccinated,”

Lungarini said.

Vaccinated athletes will have a lot more leeway, he said, if any COVID cases are found among teams during the season. A vaccinated athlete who tests positive for COVID will be allowed to continue to practice and play, as long as they are masked and they have a negative test after three days. Unvaccinated athletes will still have to quarantine for at least 10 days, provided they test negative after 7-10 days.

Lungarini cited previous studies that showed COVID-19’s transmission was negligible among sports played outdoors, and an incident-free CIAC spring championship season as reasons to be confident the 2021 football season can be played safely and successfully.

“We collected a significant amount of data last year, and those data points support that the mitigating strategies we put in place last year were effective,” he said. “We just didn’t see a large spread in athletics.

“If we need to make and adjustments, we’ll be flexible and adapt as we need to,” he added. “But we do believe, based on our practices over the past year, that we can safely play sports.”

Coaches were also concerned with the lack of experience their returning players will be bringing to practice in the coming weeks.

Players who were sophomores and freshmen in 2019 are the only ones who return with any kind of varsity experience in 2021. A majority of them haven’t seen a meaningful varsity snap in their lives and have little-to-no concept of varsity contact.

There were a handful of programs that organized independent football games last fall, but only got to play as many as four games before new state guidelines shut them down.

Coaches haven’t been allowed to work with their players on football skills since last fall. A CIACproposed “summer series” of camps never got off the ground and a spring football option, which was canceled after the 2019 season, wasn’t reinstated. An undetermined amount of programs attended offseason training camps and passing leagues, but not with their coaches.

“I’m a little skeptical, not having any contact in nearly two years,” Hillhouse coach Reggie Lytle said. “They should have given us the opportunity to work with our kids before Thursday. I’m really concerned about their physical and mental health going into the season. Now we only have about two weeks to teach them before we start playing football. It’s not enough.”