Prep sports’ return ends long, emotional wait
Welcome back, old friend. To say you were missed seems hardly adequate or sufficient. As of Saturday, it has been 50 weeks — 50 long, grueling, mostly depressing weeks — since the state of New Mexico has staged a high school sporting event.
That 11½-month drought ends, however, with the beginning of the prep cross country season. On Saturday morning at Bosque School, the Bobcats are hosting a small meet (they’ll all be small meets) with
Menaul, Bernalillo and Sandia Prep also entered.
No high school athletes have been in uniform since Las Cruces and Capital walked up the Pit ramp following the Class 5A boys state basketball final on March 14.
When the starter’s pistol goes off on Saturday morning at 10 for the girls’ race at Bosque, the abridged version of the 2020-21 prep sports calendar will be off and, well, running. The New Mexico Activities Association is having to compress all its sports into a four-month window, through the end of June. Normally, it takes nine months to accomplish this. But this is the new normal. The optics will be weird. Football ending in early April. Basketball occupying the Pit in early May. The end of the spring sports being contested weeks after the end of the academic school year, and graduations. Possibly 100-degree temperatures broiling the lot of us. And masks on every face. And yet, this is not a day to pick nits. High school sports are back, and to a degree, a certain weight is being lifted. Although not, unfortunately, for everyone. For example, Los Lunas High’s football team on Friday honored its seniors, who won’t have a season.
It would be a daunting task to try and calculate the toll the last year has taken on everyone, the athletes especially.
A mental toll. An emotional toll. A psychological toll.
During this prolonged separation,
the Superintendent in Hobbs, T.J. Parks, who also is the president of the NMAA board of directors, gave me the best single quote I received from anyone trying to describe the collateral damage caused by the pandemic.
“The kids,” he said, “are the least infected, but the most impacted, by COVID.”
This conversation took place in December, not long after the suicide of a prominent Hobbs athlete. That tragedy led to an extremely poignant gesture by neighboring communities — and even those who weren’t neighbors — which saw other cities and towns send one of their school buses to the parking lot near Ralph Tasker Arena at Hobbs High in support of the Eagles.
It was a sharp reminder that New Mexico’s high schools are a large, diverse familial unit.
Mental health has been an ongoing theme throughout the forced sabbatical created by COVID-19. It has left a sobering, dastardly mark on the state’s tight-knit prep circle. Coaches like Marcus Pino at Alamo Navajo and Prentis Jones at Rio Grande were among those whose lives were lost due to complications from COVID. Plenty other coaches and administrators, and even athletes, have battled it and faced the harsh physical symptoms.
None of this even takes into account some of the other lives in the prep community that were lost over the last year. Bill Gentry. J.B. White. Marv Sanders. On Thursday, the Superintendent in Las Cruces, Karen Trujillo, a popular administrator (she was also a member of the NMAA board of directors) and a champion of students, was struck and killed by a car as she walked her dogs.
It is, ultimately, the kids whose suffering has been so profoundly difficult to watch these last months.
They have missed out on scholarship opportunities. Social interaction. Many gave up on school altogether. A not insignificant number of athletes have moved — or will move — to another state to compete elsewhere, part of a continuing talent drain.
The following tweet showed up in my feed not long ago, relaying words written by one New Mexico athlete to his mother:
“I don’t love sports right now mom,” he said. “Everything I used to love I lost when everything shut down. I have no passion for anything anymore.” We feel their pain. And their frustration. Which brings us to the decision-makers in New Mexico, the quintessential sore subject. That includes those at the state level and others at the local level.
No need for me to regurgitate my thoughts on the state; I’m already on record twice about this in our newspaper. School boards, especially the one at Albuquerque Public Schools, also have been a target of athletes’ ire.
That legal action might come of all this illustrates how ugly this entire episode has become.
There is, for most of us, fatigue. COVID fatigue, bureaucratic fatigue, Zoom meeting fatigue, stuck-in-our-living-room fatigue. It’s been an exhausting process.
But on Saturday, I think, the healing can begin. No, there won’t be any fans at prep events (for now), and undoubtedly other issues will spring up along the way. They include positive COVID tests that shut teams down. It seems inevitable that it will occur sooner or later.
But at last, New Mexico is finally joining the nearly four dozen other states who already were playing high school sports. That surely has been one of the most hair-pulling aspects of this for kids, watching peers in other states move forward while New Mexico stood still.
On Saturday, we begin to turn the corner, with a slow march back to times we remember and recognize. It’s a start. A welcome start.