San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
READY TO GET BACK IN THE GAME
New COVID guidelines may open door for young athletes to play again
Vanessa Peña has three boys who play baseball in the Allied Gardens Little League. A year ago, the coronavirus pandemic arrived right after opening day. Almost all the games got canceled.
“It was so sad to watch this thing they love get ripped from them,” Peña said.
Now it’s back, almost.
New state COVID guidelines for youth sports went into effect Friday, and coupled with decreasing infection rates they’ve put San Diego County on the threshold of allowing some games to resume perhaps as early as this week.
Dozens of Little League baseball and girls fast-pitch softball leagues from Oceanside to San Ysidro are getting ready, fingers crossed. They’ve signed up players, scheduled tryouts, ordered uniforms.
“Everybody is so excited,” said Peña, who in addition to being a parent of three players is president of the Allied Gardens league.
Here’s how excited: When she got ready to take her boys to league tryouts last weekend, she found her 10-year-old waiting in the car. He’d been there for 30 minutes.
But not everyone is on board. Registration is down in many leagues, including Allied Gardens, where the numbers are off by about 25 percent. The Clairemont
Girls Fastpitch league, which would normally have about 200 players, has 155, according to Jessica Cain, the president.
Some leagues, now too small to survive on their own, are merging with neighboring leagues for the upcoming season. Others might not start up again at all.
The decreased participation is due to several factors, including uncertainty about whether the games will actually happen, and for how long. The new guidelines say, right near the top: “The status of return-to-competition is subject to change at any time given the level of COVID-19 transmission in California.”
There are also safety concerns. The guidelines call for face masks, social distancing, limits on the number of spectators and other protocols, but how widely will they be followed and enforced?
And parents who have lost jobs because of the pandemic might not have the money for registration fees and sports equipment. That’s prompted some leagues to woo them back by reducing fees or offering scholarships.
“I think some parents are a little hesitant, and I don’t blame them,” said Kimberly Mowrey, administrator of Little League District 33, which includes 15 leagues in San Diego and La Mesa. “They remember what happened last year, when they paid for a full season and didn’t get it.”
Skirting the rules
The shutdown last year was felt widely in San Diego County, which has long been a hotbed for baseball, softball, soccer and other team sports. Tens of thousands of boys and girls from ages 4 to 18 play every year in recreational leagues or on more competitive travel teams.
During the pandemic, socially distanced practices have been allowed, but not games. As the months have gone on, the restriction has chafed many people. They’ve held public protests, signed petitions, and filed lawsuits, adding youth sports to the politically charged conversations that have surrounded so much of the pandemic.
Some local travel teams have skirted the rules, competing in scrimmages or games surreptitiously. Or they’ve gone out of state for tournaments.
San Diego Surf, a local soccer club that hosts a major youth tournament at its fields in Del Mar every year, held it two months ago in Phoenix instead. Albion, another local club, is having one of its signature events in Bullhead City, Ariz., in a couple of weeks.
“There’s been growing frustration among the people in youth sports,” said Brian Enge, the CEO of Surf Cup sports, which has about 1,000 local kids in its programs. “The law is lagging the science and common sense. We can do this safely.”
The county health department has seen things differently. It sent his club a cease-and-desist order on Feb. 17, pointing to illegal scrimmages and games at the Del Mar fields.
Enge said a lacrosse club that rented the facility was responsible for the violations, and blamed the desist order on complaints from neighbors who have long objected to the fields being used for youth sports.
In a letter to the county, also dated Feb. 17, the club wrote, “Your focus on Surf is unequal enforcement. If you drive around the county on any weekend day, you will see full soccer games with refs, baseball games with uniforms and umpires, and passing-league football games. If you peek into the gyms, you will see league play happening in volleyball and basketball.”
The new state guidelines classify various sports based on their level of contact and transmission risk, with outdoor games considered safer in general than indoor ones, and sports with moderate contact (like baseball and softball) considered safer than sports with high contact (football, soccer, water polo). The rules allow competition to resume in stages based on coronavirus infection rates.
Public health officials said the goal is stop the coronavirus from spreading. Children are more resistant, but they can still get infected and pass it along. Officials have linked several outbreaks to youth sports, including a basketball tournament in Placer County in November that generated almost 100 infections.
Complicating all this is a Feb. 19 ruling by San Diego Superior Court Judge Earl Maas, who said youth sports games should be allowed as long as they follow “the same or similar” protocols used by professional and collegiate teams, which have been competing for months.
Those protocols generally include extensive testing and strict quarantining, and it’s unclear how many school districts will be able to implement and afford them. Some may just wait until their sports qualify under the new state guidelines, which don’t require the same level of testing and isolation.
Some aren’t waiting at all. The Surf soccer club interpreted Maas’ ruling to mean it can go ahead with games, which it did last weekend. Enge said there were about 30 games on the Del Mar fields, with a similar number expected this weekend.
A widening gap
To some observers, the pandemic has exacerbated a longstanding problem with youth sports: the difference between the haves and the have-nots.
“One of the biggest challenges is the gap between those who can afford it and those who can’t,” said Jon Solomon, editorial director of the Washington D.c.-based Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program.
That gap widened during the 2008 recession, he said, when leagues in lower-income areas that depend on public parks and recreation centers saw facilities shuttered by revenue-strapped local governments.
Travel teams in wealthier areas, which can own or rent private fields, were not similarly hampered.
Things got better in the decade that followed, “but then the pandemic came along and blew everything up,” he said. Travel teams have again fared better, although that’s a relative concept: Enge, from Surf Cup Sports, said revenues are down 80 percent over the past year.
Decreased participation, whatever the cause, is worrying in some quarters because there are welldocumented benefits for kids who play sports.
“When sports are delivered properly, kids are less likely to be obese, more likely to have higher academic scores, and more likely to have good self-esteem,” Solomon said. “They are also more likely to be healthier throughout their lives, and to pass along those habits to their kids as well.”
By “delivered properly,” Solomon said, he means teams with well-trained coaches and well-organized leagues. Teams that don’t overemphasize winning, and that don’t force kids to specialize in one particular sport too soon. Teams that don’t take the play out of playing.
As it is now, he said, the average child drops out of organized sports by age 11. “They quit because it stops being fun,” he said.
A year ago, quitting was out of their hands. The coronavirus did it for them.
“I think what they missed most was just getting out and being with their friends,” said Cain, the Clairemont Girls Fastpitch president. “Kids love playing. And losing sports was the first step in shutting everything down. First softball, then school.”
She paused, and her voice brightened.
“They’re just so excited to get out there again,” she said. “They need it.”