Pa. leagues considering pushing back start of fall sports
Less than 24 hours after that the PIAA announced that its Sports Medicine Advisory Committee gave a thumbs up to starting fall sports on time, leagues across the state are saying they’re going to delay opening the season.
Aaron Menapace, the athletic director at Hamburg and the football chairman for the BCIAA, is dumbfounded by that line of thought.
“We have the best people in Pennsylvania possible on the Sports Medicine Advisory Committee,” Menapace said, “and their opinion is that it would be mentally healthy for kids to return to play. Their opinion gave us a whole series of guidelines (and) said, ‘Go play.’ If the smartest people on the medical side are saying that, I’m not going to pretend I know more than them.”
In addition to the SMAC’s vote of confidence, the PIAA also announced plans on Wednesday to allow schools and leagues options for delayed starts to the fall sports season. Once it did the dominoes began to fall.
The Eastern Pennsylvania Conference in the Lehigh Valley decided Thursday to delay the start of contact sports — football, soccer and field hockey — according to a report in the Morning Call.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that the WPIAL, the largest league in the state with over 150 members, will not start football until Sept. 10, and will limit the regular season to seven games.
The Sentinel in Carlisle reported that
District 3 is surveying its members to determine if it should delay the start of the fall season.
Kerry Ciatto, executive director of the Berks County Interscholastic Athletic Association, told the Reading Eagle Friday that the league has taken no action yet but that there will be discussions about it next week. A virtual meeting is planned for Monday.
Menapace is miffed that District 3 may be changing lanes so close to the scheduled start of the fall season.
“If District 3 has questions about what our league thinks, I really wish they would have asked those questions a long time ago,” he said in regard to the survey. “We’re in the 11th hour and we’re now being asked to make decisions in haste.”
Scholastic sports across the state remain in a state of flux, with ever-changing guidelines and decisions happening on a daily basis due to health and safety protocols designed to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
“PIAA is committed to maximizing the athletic opportunities for students across the Commonwealth,” according to a release posted on the governing body’s website. “In addressing the COVID-19 crisis and how it has affected the 67 counties differently, PIAA understands the flexibility needed by school districts to make localized measured decisions.”
The SMAC report did acknowledge that schools face “challenges” in re-starting and that “doing so may require suspension of athletics until schools get started so students may adjust to bus and daily schedules.”
The SMAC encouraged every effort to proceed with fall sports, saying: “There are numerous ‘what-ifs’ and a big one may be the ‘what-if’ we don’t try and we could have completed play,... and we didn’t try and shut down because we’re guessing. For that reason, the Committee believes an effort should be made to give students an opportunity to participate.”
With the PIAA deciding to shorten its football season from 16 weeks to 14, its 12 districts must consider revamping their playoff structures and possibly reducing the number of regular season games.
As a way to help schools deal with changes brought on by COVID-19, the PIAA Board of Control Wednesday offered three options for the start of the fall season:
A regular start, with heat acclimatization practices for football starting Aug. 10 and all other sports Aug. 17.
An alternate start, which provides up to a three-week delay, with football games starting Sept. 18 and all other sports Sept. 14.
A hybrid start, which would allow schools to start sports as late as Oct. 5.
“To aid our school districts, PIAA has offered flexibility to schools (and) leagues to begin contests after the first contest date,” according to the release. “We will remain flexible in considering that certain sports may be impacted differently and postseason play may need to be modified.”
To accommodate the later start, the WPIAL is canceling games scheduled for Weeks 1-3 and moving its Week 10 games to Week 4. The start of heat acclimatization workouts remains Aug. 10; other sports will start Aug. 17.
The WPIAL also will truncate its playoff format.