BCIAA UNVEILS PLAN
Official football workouts for Berks high schools will begin Aug. 31 and practices for other contact sports will open Sept. 4
The mad scramble to reconfigure the fall sports season is on in Berks County.
Athletic directors will be rescheduling or canceling more than 100 games over the next several days or weeks because of the COVID-19 induced delayed start to the season.
No one’s sure yet whether there even will be a season — that’ll depend on the result of expected conversations between PIAA officials and Gov. Tom Wolf — but at least for now Berks ADs have a game plan.
That came into focus Tuesday when the BCIAA determined that official football workouts for Berks high school teams will begin Aug. 31 and practices for other contact sports will open Sept. 4.
That will lead to football games the weekend of Sept. 18 and contests in the other fall contact sports — boys and girls soccer, field hockey, girls volleyball and water polo — on Sept. 22.
After pronouncements late last week, when Gov. Wolf “strongly recommended” suspending youth sports across the state and the PIAA pushed back the official start of practice to Aug. 24, everything had been up in the air.
“It’s been so difficult,” said Berks County Interscholastic Athletic Association executive director Kerry Ciatto of planning and scheduling in an atmosphere where different and oft-changing messages are being heard from the governor, the PIAA and school superintendents.
Football will open with a week of non-contact heat acclimatization workouts, followed by two weeks of contact practice for a total of 15 practices.
That means some Berks football teams will be able to play seven games prior to the start of the District 3 Tournament; Class 6A and Class 3A schools will play six regular season games before their district tournaments begin.
Schools that don’t make the district football tournament fields or which opt out of the playoffs can play additional games throughout the district tournament.
Most schools will be forced to cancel at least three football games, most likely non-league contests during what were the opening weeks of the season, which initially was scheduled to begin Aug. 28.
The highly anticipated Gov. Mifflin vs. Wilson football game, scheduled for Sept. 4, could be in jeopardy, though both schools are expected to make a strong effort to move it to another date. It’s possible they could meet Sept. 18 in a season opener.
The regular season-ending match-up between Lancaster-Lebanon
League Section 1 rivals Wilson and Manheim Township will have to be moved elsewhere on the schedule because the Class 6A and Class 3A district semifinals are now scheduled for that weekend. The same could apply for the Frost Bowl between Hamburg and Schuylkill Valley.
The BCIAA has informed its members that scheduling league contests should take precedence over non-league contests.
Non-contact sports — golf, girls tennis and cross country — will get earlier starts with practice for each starting Aug. 24. Golf matches will begin Aug. 27, tennis matches Aug. 31 and cross country meets Sept. 14.
The BCIAA will penalize any school that starts prior to these dates by making them ineligible for postseason play in all sports for the entire 2020-21 school year.
The PIAA announced last week that it was pushing the start of fall practices back two weeks to Aug. 24. Heat acclimatization for football was scheduled to begin Aug. 10; practice for other sports were scheduled to begin Aug. 17.
The Lancaster-Lebanon and York-Adams leagues are starting at roughly the same time as Berks (Wilson is an member of the L-L in football and can begin heat acclimatization workouts Aug. 31); the Mid-Penn Conference can start practices Sept. 4, but have the option to start practice Sept. 8.
“All of District 3 is basically doing the same thing, which is very good,” Ciatto said.
The higher seed will host BCIAA playoff games; in the past the league has used neutral sites and scheduled doubleheaders when possible. The structure of the playoff fields will remain unchanged.
For tennis, the BCIAA will switch to an abbreviated 3-2 format (three singles matches, two doubles matches); in the past it used a 5-2 format.
Cheerleading is considered a contact sport and practice can not start until Sept. 4.
Practice for junior high sports will begin Sept. 8.