Furious about spring high school football? Your beef’s with Gov. Polis, not CHSAA
Here’s the thing about the spring on the Plains: It blows. On March 6, 2017, NOAA charted a 50-mile-per-hour wind gust at Fort Morgan Municipal airport. The average maximum wind speed since 2012 around Fort Morgan checks in at 22.1 miles per hour in April, higher than any single month. March and May’s max gusts average out at 20.2 and 20.8, respectively.
“Mitch doesn’t like to punt anyway,” Wiggins superintendent Trent Kerr laughed, referencing Tigers football coach Mitch Risner, father of Broncos guard Dalton Risner.
“(He’ll) tell you, ‘We’re not punting out here.’ The wind in March, we’re punting backward if we’re going into it. There are going to be some different experiences, I guess, for all of us as (the dates) come forward.”
Kerr and his rural peers outside the Front Range, a bunch of whom met via a Zoom call with CHSAA executive director Rhonda Blanford-green this past Thursday, are not wild, and understandably, about football in March.
For one, the schools in the east have to wrestle that wind; the programs out west, the snow. For another, Kerr, whose son plays quarterback for Risner, worries about the lack of game experience — and footage — kids can put on tape before college football’s December and February signing periods.
But they also concede that miserably cold and windy football is a heck of a lot better than no football at all. Or no playoffs. Or standings that start to resemble the National League’s East and Central divisions, where COVID is running away with the pennant.
“I think it’s important that we reflect back on March and April and realize that we’re at a place now where we can provide opportunities across the board for the diversity of sports and activities that we offer,” Blanford-green said. “With a better opportunity of not only starting a season, but having a culminating season event.”
CHSAA didn’t do the right thing. Right left the building, arm-in-arm with Elvis, ages ago. It did the prudent thing for the majority of its membership, given a raging landscape of hypotheticals and unknowns.
It did the prudent thing within the confines of an academic calendar, fiscal realities and the boundaries established by state authorities. Your beefs about spring football are with Gov. Jared Polis, not Blanford-green.
“We’re in uncharted waters,” Meeker superintendent Chris Selle said. “I don’t think anybody knows exactly what various paths forward may look like.”
Except that none of them are ideal. Let’s make a few things clear. One, masks are scientific suggestions, not political ones. Second, in a pandemic, every option comes with varying degrees of crapola. There are no clean, traditional, familiar paths of comfort, no assurances. Third, when you make solutions provincial, no one is ever going to land on the same page at every turn. Rural schools have a lower population density and fewer positive cases of coronavirus. Why should we have to upset decades of community tradition, they’ll contend, because the Front Range is a hot mess? It’s a fair point.
This is about goals, and end games, that don’t always mesh in a crisis. All parents want the best, safest experience possible for their teens. Many parents also want an experience that maximizes scholarship opportunities at the next level, whatever that level is.
Families and towns are in it for the micro, CHSAA for the macro. A season it doesn’t have to stop. A postseason it can start — and, more importantly, finish.
Prep football doesn’t have the luxury of NFL flex weeks. Or the budget to test kids, coaches and support staff as frequently as the experts would prefer in order to prevent a surge spawning from under the Friday night lights.
“(That’s) one thing we might have to get creative with,” Kerr said. “You might not even have a Friday night kick.”
Wiggins is exploring Saturday afternoon or Thursday kickoffs. Yes, that sounds crazy weird to Kerr, too. All of this does.
“The thing that I hope and I’m really hopeful for is that we’re still able to play,” Kerr noted. “That we’re not just pushing this back to say, ‘Nope, it’s canceled altogether.’ I think if we did that, that would absolutely crush these kids.”
Before you rage about Colorado’s high school football calendar, ask a girls basketball player, a sprinter or a pitcher how this past March or April felt. And ask Blanford-green why she never wants to have to make that call ever again.