CIF: Fall sports will be delayed
Revisions due to virus include football title games in April, basketball moved to spring
Weeks of speculation became reality Monday when the California Interscholastic Federation, the state’s governing body for high school athletics, announced that the fall sports season will be delayed until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The revised calendar calls for CIF football championships to be held April 17, with section playoffs scheduled for no later than April 10. Basketball, normally played during the winter months, will be woven into the spring season. The CIF playoffs for basketball will end June 19, one week after the completion of the section playoffs.
These changes come with the expectation that the virus’s grip on California will relent by the new year, which most experts have said is far from a guarantee. If it doesn’t, the CIF will have another, more drastic decision to make on sports for the remainder of the school year.
Most of the CIF’s statewide championships, including football and basketball, will be only regional, eliminating state titles, CIF executive director Ron Nocetti told this news organization.
“We didn’t want to do anything that would limit the section championships from being played in their entirety if at all possible,” he added. “I think that’s why you saw the limit to the state events to just one week.
“Some of our sports go straight to state events, like cross country, wrestling, track and field and swimming and diving. The others will be regional-based events.”
If there are no changes, basketball would go two consecutive seasons without a state championship; the pandemic caused the cancellation of the 2020 state finals in March.
“With all of the things that we’re dealing
with, I think that’s the least of everyone’s concern, is a state championship,” Miramonte girls basketball coach Kelly Sopak said.
California joins New Mexico as the only states thus far to postpone high school sports until 2021 because of the virus that has infected more than 3.7 million people in the United States, resulting in 143,000 deaths.
Traditional fall sports teams will begin practice in December or January as determined by their section, according to the CIF.
“What started out with multiple plans came down to the one that everyone thought gave as many opportunities to as many students as possible to have close to a full season,” Nocetti said.
Some coaches didn’t anticipate the CIF combining winter sports — including basketball, soccer and wrestling — with spring sports. Many thought the state would choose a model of three truncated seasons, perhaps as short as eight weeks in length.
“I was concerned for the multisport athletes,” Saratoga football coach and athletic director Tim Lugo said. “This will hurt some sports, and kids will have to choose which sports to play.”
Baseball, softball and track and field championships are the last events on the CIF’s new calendar, each scheduled for June 26, about a month later than a normal school year.
“Given our current state of our pandemic, I have to be cautiously optimistic,” Archbishop Mitty girls basketball coach Sue Phillips said. “While the calendar is in place, some things have to fall into place still.”
The North Coast Section, the local governing body for schools stretching from the East Bay to the coastal side of the Oregon border, announced that its calendar would mirror that of the state. Football practice can begin Dec. 14, and games can start Jan. 6.
The Central Coast Section, which extends from King City to San Francisco and includes the South Bay, is expected to reveal its plans today after an executive board meeting.
Los Gatos football coach Mark Krail said he is grateful that the CIF bought some extra time.
“The easy thing would have been to cancel everything,” he said.
The fall postponement is not unprecedented. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20, the CIF’s Southern Section held its football championship in March.
With Monday’s announcement, COVID-19 has now officially affected all three seasons of high school sports in California, with the 2020 state basketball tournament and all spring sports canceled earlier in the pandemic. Now, the hammer has dropped on the state’s most popular sport — football — a decision that had one high-profile coach thinking in nostalgic terms on the eve of the news.
“This is looking like the first fall I’ve had without football since 1993,” De La Salle football coach Justin Alumbaugh wrote in a text Sunday night.
Alumbaugh, 40, was in middle school then.