USA TODAY International Edition
High school play may be a tough call
It’s been about two weeks since Andy Stefanelli’s football team started gathering again.
At first it was four groups of nineman pods doing weight training, split up so they could all do work at once. Last week, skill practices started with the same nine- man pods and no more than 50 players on the field at once. There are symptom checks and protocols, social distancing and disinfectant.
Stefanelli, coach at Our Lady of Good Counsel in Olney, Maryland – the WCAC champion in 2019 and one of the country’s elite high school football programs – has yet to speak to his entire team at once.
It’s safe, or as safe as high school football can be amid the coronavirus pandemic, and that’s really the problem. Because keeping the kids six feet apart isn’t too hard, Stefanelli says, ex
cept when they’re between drills or in line. That’s when they naturally drift toward each other and talk.
There’s also the liability waiver families had to sign, which Stefanelli calls, “standard practice everywhere, as people return to doing things in schools and things like that.” Most families signed away.
“If it was a liability waiver for COVID19, that strikes me as pretty unethical,” said Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University. “And if I had a kid and his coach asked him to sign that waiver, I would never let that kid play for that coach again.”
Though whether such waivers would hold up in court is unclear, they could become common in high school programs nationwide that hold a fall season. In Florida, the FHSAA discussed having athletes sign waivers acknowledging signs and symptoms of COVID19, as well as its risks, at a meeting last Monday. Gary Joseph, the coach of Katy High School in Texas, said his athletes haven’t signed any waivers yet, but he wouldn’t be surprised if such a thing were to eventually happen.
Stefanelli knows the coronavirus is serious, but he feels safe and he wants to coach. He hears talk about playing a spring season and thinks it would be a mistake. He knows pushing back the start of the season is a serious possibility and so is canceling everything. Nearby Prince George’s County recently announced its classes would be virtual until at least February, though it’s unclear exactly how that will affect sports. Still, he wants to play, and being in Maryland, where the numbers aren’t too bad, he thinks it’s safe.
“If schools in Texas or Florida and Arizona, where there’s spikes, say, ‘ Hey, look, we’re gonna push it off,’ I think at least there’s some data driving that,” he said. “Where it’s happening in areas that it’s not, I wonder what they’re looking at. What’s driving that decision?
“I think the kids are less susceptible to this. Certainly the severity of it seems to me much, much less for them. I think, again, it doesn’t mean they just throw them back into the normal way of doing things like we used to. There’s gonna have to be a lot of thought and a lot of planning and a lot of adjustments on the school’s part.”
As of now, only a few states have gone as far as pushing their start dates back, but discussion about doing so has picked up in many parts of the country. New Mexico became the first state to move its fall sports season to the spring last week, and more could soon follow.
Doing that comes with its own issues. Depending exactly which sports are played when, it could force multisport athletes to choose among them. Moving fall sports to a spring season might mean that players committed to playing in college in the fall might sit out to avoid injury. On the other end of that recruiting spectrum, it might make it harder for someone on the bubble to get offers.
“I already think it’s hurting recruiting for a young kid,” said Jamey DuBose, coach at Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Georgia. “I’ve got about three or four sophomore kids that are probably, I would say looking at them and knowing them, they’re gonna be Power Five guys. But normally those guys would already have maybe got an offer or maybe have gotten quite a bit of interest. And schools really don’t know much about them right now, because they didn’t have an opportunity to see them in spring training as a sophomore athlete.”
Moving to the spring doesn’t guarantee anyone will be able to play safely then. It buys time for the pandemic to ease, but there’s no guarantee of that happening.
With the U. S. recently crossing the 70,000 cases per day threshold, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts say playing sports in the fall simply isn’t smart in most parts of the country.
“In my mind, I don’t know how you do it ( in certain places) without just saying well, we’re gonna accept, football’s more important than people’s health,” said Preeti Malani, the chief health officer at the University of Michigan and a member of the Big Ten’s task force on returning to play. “And it’s not just the individuals playing football, it’s really what it does to a whole community.”
Malani doesn’t think playing is impossible with the right precautions and the right environment. But that means a 14- day decline in caseload and a positivity rate about 5%, which few places in the U. S. have right now. Least of all, football hotbeds such as Florida, Texas and Louisiana, where a high school player was recently hospitalized with COVID- 19.
The issues are compounded at the high school level, where not every school has the same resources as Our Lady of Good Counsel, a private high school that can afford to clean surfaces regularly, keep hand sanitizer at the ready and use an athletic trainer. Almost no one can afford to regularly test athletes for coronavirus, as is being done in college and the pros.
Guidelines, like those being followed in every state that’s allowing football teams to work out, can help mitigate risk. But they can’t eliminate it. And competition is a different animal than the acclimatization or skill work happening in many states now.
You can socially distance during conditioning. A football game still requires 22 players getting up close and personal.
“I know coaches are gonna do their best, but they’re not necessarily trained at this stuff, right?” Binney said. “So I think that is taking a risk. And having fewer resources means that it’s more likely the virus sneaks in and makes its way around the team. Especially if you’re not testing regularly, to be able to catch it before people develop symptoms, which we know is insufficient, and results in large outbreaks if you just wait for symptoms.”
The science is clear that COVID- 19 rarely leads to serious complications or death in young people, but high school football isn’t its own ecosystem. Players interact with coaches, teachers, their families and other kids.
In other words, the fear isn’t just that players will infect one another, it’s that high school football players might spread the coronavirus in their community.
“When you have no immunity to speak of, really, in the community, it can just really rage like wildfire,” Malani said. “So I think that the communities that want their students to play football, I don’t know.”
In Katy, Joseph, the coach of a high school program that’s won eight state titles, says the safety protocols aren’t necessarily easy to follow. He also knows that his kids likely are not staying socially distant – he sees them getting into cars in groups when parents pick them up from strength and conditioning work – making the protocols at practice largely ceremonial.
Katy is in Harris County, home to Houston, a hot spot that’s generally seen more than 1,000 cases per day recently. On July 13, an emergency broadcast in the county urged people to stay home.
The caseload in Katy specifically hasn’t been that high, but of the three medical experts interviewed for this story, none would even entertain the idea that it’s safe to play football in Texas.
In Dallas, a school superintendent admitted recently that a fall season is unlikely. Last Monday, the University Interscholastic League announced the season would be delayed five weeks for the state’s two largest classifications, one of which includes Katy.
Joseph sees the apprehension and hopes they can still pull out a fall season. He knows how much football means to the kids and the community. His program already had a two- week shutdown after restarting workouts, but the protocols – even if imperfect – make him feel safe.
Still, he knows they might not be enough.
“We don’t want to endanger our kids,” Joseph said. “We’re not gonna endanger our kids. If this is not a situation where we feel comfortable and confident in them coming out of it, we don’t need to play.”
As for how he’d judge that danger? “Just because they test positive doesn’t mean they’re gonna die,” he said. “You look at the number, the ratio. I know one kid dead would be devastating, but again, I don’t want to endanger our kids.
“But I don’t want to take away something that’s been great for them throughout the years.”