MIAA urging vaccination

Following a recommendation by the Sports Medicine Committee, the MIAA Board of Directors voted 22-0-1 in favor of urging student-athletes receive a COVID-19 vaccination shot.

New MIAA Executive Director Bob Baldwin said the National Federation of High Schools are meeting with states with the end goal of getting as many kids vaccinated as possible. He went on to mention the need to be proactive in terms of winter sports, especially since one of the venues the MIAA has used in the past for tournament play in basketball and hockey (TD Garden) recently implemented its own policies regarding vaccinations.

Lindsey von Holtz, president of the MIAA Board, expressed concern. She wanted to know if there were any legal ramifications involved in making this decision, adding that the MIAA might want to look into other venues and their policies. She doesn’t want to see a team and/or player not be able to play somewhere because they have not been vaccinated.

Not surprisingly, the topic of statewide tournaments came up. MIAA Assistant Executive Director Sherry Bryant said the Tournament Management Committee is confident they can roll it out in time. Bryant cautioned that it probably won’t be perfect the first time around, but said it is a step forward and the TMC will continually work to refine the policy.

Statewide rankings are scheduled to debut on the MIAA website this week. The hope of Bryant and other board members is once the rankings go up, if schools are not reporting scores in a timely manner, they might feel some sort of peer pressure to step it up.

New board member Jim Quatromoni, the athletic director at Hingham, asked why the Board requested the TMC to come with a tournament format that is consistent across the board. Von Holtz said there was some concern that different tournaments used different systems in how they seeded the teams, pointing out Western Mass. used the Walker System.

MIAA assistant directors Mike Rubin and Kathleen McSweeney presented a new proposal, which addressed discrimination in the hopes that it would be approved in the next meeting (Oct. 27) and put into place shortly thereafter.