What’s next for preps after things normalize?
Caught briefly on the phone and asked how he was doing early Monday afternoon, Dave Grissom was quick to respond: “Busy.”
It had been just hours since Gov. Gavin Newsom made official the news that had made Grissom double-take while heading to bed the night before: California’s stay-at-home order had been lifted, paving the way for the first high-school sports competitions in nearly a year. The commissioner of the California Interscholastic Federation’s Central Coast Section had to start making calls to his leagues.
The next week will be a mad scramble for high school sports leagues around the Bay Area and California to finalize shortened seasons and make difficult decisions about how to balance playing games as soon as permitted with the potential to disqualify themselves from section or state playoffs, if there are any at
all. Sections within the CIF have already made divergent decisions about what to prioritize.
“I don’t think anyone expected (the stay-at-home order) to drop this week,” Grissom said. “I think people were looking out to maybe mid-February before they thought they could maybe start competition. So it ramps things up pretty quickly.”
The Central Coast Section has allowed teams in all sports to begin practicing (with restrictions such as masks and physically distanced drills), but it has opted to keep its season schedule aligned with the state governing body, meaning only cross country meets could start in the coming weeks. It has ruled out playoffs for season one, but teams in season two could still qualify for section or state playoffs. Meanwhile, the North Coast Section has already canceled all its section playoffs but has moved more aggressively to return purple-tier sports to the field.
The NCS Board of Managers will hold their winter meeting Friday over video conference. The return-toplay revisions that the section’s executive committee approved this month are among the agenda items that’ll be up for a vote. Board approval would clear the way for the section’s purple-tier sports to start official practice Monday, marking the first time since the pandemic shutdown in March that NCS athletes will participate in official workouts.
Q&AS WITH NCS COMMISSIONERS » Pat Cruickshank, North Coast Section commissioner.
Darren Sabedra: Just to be clear, leagues in your section are free to devise their own calendar model?
Pat Cruickshank: That’s accurate. They can put together their calendars based upon what (restrictions) their local counties are in, how their local schools and school districts are working with them, and all we’ve asked if that they run it by us so we can take a look — just to make sure it looks good and they have another set of eyes on it.
DS: Do you have any sense of what the models will look like?
PC: I am not sure how they are going to do it. I know that they have been working together, league commissioners have been working together and talking about how they’re putting their own (calendars) together. I am anticipating that they will get them to us (soon). I have seen a couple and have made some comments on them.
DS: Are leagues leaning more toward a two-season model?
PC: I hate to try and guess. But it appears, to me, that really what they’ll try to do is get something started in the purple tiers that they can, just so that we can have some competition and have some things started. That’s what I have seen so far, the ones that have sent them to me to take a look at. But I think each league is going to be a little bit different. Might see some different things happening. Some might start with track, some might start with cross country. I think they have to figure out what it is that works best for them. That’s the whole reason behind it. It made a lot of sense to give a little bit of that autonomy to the leagues to do what was best for their particular area.
DS: Have you heard of any NCS leagues considering a three-season model?
PC: I think our leagues are going to be all over the place. There are people who might feel that a three-season model is a good model. Just in the conversations between the (league) commissioners and us, trying to get started with purple and making adjustments as we go along and a lot being done in pencil and being able to change when we have the ability to change it, that’s the flexibility that we gave them. You could see a lot of different things from our section. When you look at the leagues that we have and they’re in different areas throughout the section, you could have something completely different up in the Humboldt area than you have in the greater Bay Area because of what their county looks like.
DS: How many counties in the section?
PC: 12.
DS: How many schools in the NCS?
PC: 175.
DS: The LA City has moved its end football date from April 17 to April 30. Any chance the NCS could do something similar?
PC: I think there will probably be some conversation on Friday about it. Q&AS WITH CCS COMMISSIONERS » Dave Grissom, Central Coast Section commissioner.
Evan Webeck: We’ve seen the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League come out with its own three-season schedule. Is that a model you agree with and/or see others in your section adopting?
Dave Grissom: I’ve been in all (SCVAL’s) meetings, either I have or the assistant commissioner, one of us has been in all of the league meetings. On us removing the season one playoff, that’s really the reason why we did so, to allow leagues to morph however they needed to in order to serve their students. For instance, we all highly doubt Monterey is going to be out of the purple anytime soon, so they needed to go in a different direction than, say, San Mateo County. The reality is that we can’t play one another within the section anyway beyond the adjacent county, so it kind of limits what we can do with our playoffs anyway. We have not eliminated season two playoffs now because, frankly, there’s no reason for us to. Things could open up or change as we get further and further along between now and June. Yet our leagues, as long as they have their seasons within our season, could be eligible for the playoffs if we have them. I got excited that we have finally lifted the stay-at-home order, unless a county becomes more restrictive and I have not heard that as of yet, then we could start competition in our purple sports. In CCS, we’ve continued to keep all our seasons as they were to match the state. For instance, cross country could start today, unless a county becomes more restrictive.