UAMS offers guidelines for restart of high school sports

With Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson planning to announce guidelines for team sports on May 20, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences released a set of guidelines to “help high school and collegiate sports teams plan to safely resume activities during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The guidelines, which outlined suggested measures for athletic programs, come a week before the governor’s announcement regarding team sports.

Arkansas Department of Health Secretary Dr. Nate Smith said during the governor’s daily COVID-19 news conference in Little Rock on Wednesday that while he had not read the information from UAMS in detail, he noted that “their expressed intent for that was not to replace guidance or directives from the Department of Health but to provide a guidance document to those who are putting together those team sports.”

“Our team that is working on that directive, finalizing that directive, also has access to that,” he said. “Not everything that they’ve included in theirs will be in ours, but I don’t think there’ll be anything that’s out of sync or not harmonized [with UAMS’ recommendations].”

While the guidelines from UAMS will not be the final guidelines from the governor and the Department of Health, they do offer athletic directors and coaches the opportunity to get a glimpse into what they might see next week.

UAMS said that the goal of releasing the guidelines is “to provide recommendations reflective of medical best practices and keep the health and safety of student-athletes, administrators, coaches, staff and fans as the No. 1 priority.”

“We must all work together to safely return to sports,” the news release stated. “At stake is the health of our student-athletes, our communities, our economy, our state and our nation. As soon as it is safe to do so we want athletics to resume. We must remain diligent in reducing the risk of infection as much as possible.”

Some of the recommendations from UAMS include:

• educating coaches and staff on COVID-19 and how to prevent the disease;

• screening student-athletes daily, including temperature checks, symptom assessments and inquiries into the athlete’s possible exposure;

• maintaining social distancing and using masks while traveling;

• limiting athletes to their own water bottles during practice and games;

• sanitizing equipment between use, such as vault poles, weight room equipment and balls; and

• reducing the amount of simultaneous contact by limiting meetings to smaller groups.

Lake Hamilton athletic director Rick Waters feels that the suggestions are good, but he is concerned about enforcing some of them.

“You can tell them not to drink after each other, but Joe over here might have the flu, and there’ll be 10 people drink out his Coke bottle,” he said. “They don’t care. Are we going to have to provide 100 water bottles for kids on the sideline for football for everybody to have their own water bottle? That’s things that we’ll just have to battle through.”

Hot Springs athletic director Rodney Echols said that the need to disinfect raises additional issues as well.

“I had this conversation with a few of my coaches today, and if everything does open back up, it just gives you a little light. It gives you a little enthusiasm about athletics, but the problem doesn’t go away,” he said. “So when you do think about it, … if you open up basketball practice or weight room, you’ve got to go in and clean and disinfect for the next person or next group. Just think about basketball practice. A group of people comes in, you’ve got to go in and sanitize the locker rooms, and you think about the hands that the basketballs have touched.

“And you’ve got to have the equipment. I’m looking into buying

Clorox sprayers, and they’re $5,000 apiece to help spray and disinfect areas after use. But it puts more emphasis on our coaches having to do that. It turns from just wanting to be a coach to now, you’re maintenance.”

The cost of the possible additional supplies for disinfection and screening will likely hurt smaller school districts, and if a sports hiatus continues into the fall, the loss of football will be detrimental to athletic budgets.

“We’re very that we have an outstanding athletic trainer in Kelly O’Neal,” said Jessieville athletic director Jamie Saveall. “We’re probably one of the very few schools our size that have their own athletic trainer. … Having her on staff will help us tremendously in checking kids on a daily basis and things like that. But those type things are going to add up. We’re in a situation where football sort of runs our athletic budget. Without it, it’s going to be tough, and that’s the same way all the way up. Colleges and everything else, football is the beast that keeps it rolling.”

Lakeside athletic director Don Pierce said that the guidelines made him think about small things that he would not normally think about.

“I think the biggest thing I’ve taken from it, just reading through it, was that all the things that we’re going to have to look at,” he said. “You don’t think about a door handle — how many people touch that in athletics, coming in and out. They put something in there about leaving a door open; yeah, that makes sense. Let’s leave the door open. Your trainers masking up and the kids masking up to come in there and get taped, are we going to furnish masks, or are we going to ask the kids to have grandmother make them a mask? Because that’s going to happen a lot.”

Fountain Lake athletic director Marc Davis said that he has started purchasing additional medical equipment, such as gloves, in case the athletic department has to increase its use of them.

“I’ve already started buying masks and gloves, just in case,” he said. “If we don’t need them, great. If we need them, we’ve

got them.

“In our role as athletic administrators, we’ve got to be prepared [as if] we’re going to play.

So you’re always trying to think ahead, for lack of a better way to put it. If you’re not prepared, you’re behind the eight ball. Again, who knows what they’re gonna tell us, but at least in our role we have to be prepared to play and part of that is going out there and trying to secure some thermometers or face masks or whatever they’re asking. But it does give a little bit of knowledge of at least what somebody is thinking.”