The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Area coaches working through uncertain future
There are some things that will be forever associated with spring in Northeast Ohio.
Days getting longer and (slightly) warmer, birds chirping and ... high school football?
Under a proposal put forth by a group of Central Ohio high school football coaches, a spring high school football season in Ohio made headlines this week.
The proposal, first reported by ThisWeekNews, asked for a straight swap of fall and spring sports, which in turn would push the upcoming football season into the spring.
Under the proposal, the fall sports season would consist of baseball, field hockey, golf, softball, tennis, track and field and volleyball while the spring season would consist of cross country, football, lacrosse and soccer. The winter sports season would have included basketball, bowling, gymnastics, hockey and wrestling.
July 13, the OHSAA and the Ohio High School Football Coaches Association announced the proposal wouldn’t be forwarded to the OHSAA’s board. The OHSAA doubled down a day later July 14. OHSAA Interim Executive Director Bob Goldring said on a conference call with reporters it’s up to individual schools to decide whether or not they will participate in fall sports. Goldring also said schools get to decide whether or not to reopen for inperson learning in the fall.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Avon Lake coach Matt Kostelnik said of Goldring’s announcement.
“I could kind of see that coming down the pipeline that it would be up to individual schools.”
Goldring’s announcement puts the onus on schools to make the decision about sports, something Columbia coach Jason Ward believes could be a tough decision for area administrators.
“All these superintendents and administrators are all going to base their decision on the (coronavirus) numbers,” Ward said. “I’m lucky to work for an awesome superintendent, and I think that even he would be the first to say, ‘Hey, I’m not a scientist.’ It’s almost like they’re washing their hands from it on the state level and just saying that individual schools have to do what they think is right. When the time comes and Aug. 1 comes around, who knows what the right decision will be?”
In addition to being the head coach at Columbia, Ward is also the OHSFCA’s Region IV director. On the afternoon of July 12, OHFCSA president Tom Pavlansky put out a statement stressing the proposal was a hypothetical idea, and anything not put out by the OHSFCA or OHSAA is a rumor and isn’t official.
“I don’t know that anything’s been shot down,” Ward said. “We’re all just focusing on Aug. 1 right now and if a decision is made to have the football season in the spring then we’ll look at every idea we can.”
While Ward and the OHSFCA have been meeting since the novel coronavirus pandemic started, he said the past couple of meetings have mostly been focused on changes that could be made to this year’s high school football season.
In the aforementioned proposal, the coaches proposed a six-week regular season that starts Feb. 26 with practices beginning on Feb. 1. The playoffs would begin April 9 — with every team in the state qualifying — and the state championship games taking place May 20-22.
While that schedule was shot down with the proposal, there’s a good chance, if a spring football season were to be held, it would line up with those dates, something that could present a problem for some area schools.
“You’re talking about the worst weather, especially for schools like ours with no turf,” Ward said. “It’s going to be pretty nasty. It would be pretty muddy and pretty ugly out there on some of those practice fields.”
Much like the Raiders, Elyria Catholic and Coach Brian Fox practice and play on a grass field.
“If you’re one of those teams that don’t have lights or a turf field, once that sun goes down you can’t practice,” Fox said. “I think that’s almost bigger than the temperature. The argument could be made that at the end of the winter your body is more acclimated to the cold, but if you think about falling on the cold ground it’s not fun. I’m really not a fan of that, but you have to start earlier if you want to try to have a semi-normal time frame the next year.”
A spring football season’s impact isn’t just limited to other spring sports. A football season starting in February would impact the regularly scheduled postseason tournaments in winter sports, which means, if the winter sports schedule isn’t modified, football players who play a winter sport will have to choose between starting football or finishing out their season.
“I kind of feel bad for the basketball teams,” Fox said. “If we’re going to start that early we’re starting to run into the basketball playoffs. Football isn’t like basketball where you can just pop in for a few practices and then you’re ready to play. I think a lot of kids play basketball because they like it, but they’re a football player at heart, and because of that I think those kids won’t play basketball and that’ll hurt the programs.”
Even if this hypothetical spring season was able to go off without a hitch, there wouldn’t be much of an offseason.
“(In 2021) we’d be rolling into another season and, even with a 30-day no-contact period, we’d still have nine straight months of football from March to November,” Ward said. “That might drive some kids away. We have a community of guys who love football, but that’s a lot.
“I’m worried about if a junior tears their ACL in the spring and then aren’t able to play in the fall. I’m also worried about early enrollment. Your top-100 players in Ohio are going to be able to enroll at their respective colleges early, and they may have to make a choice between taking a scholarship or playing their senior high school season. There’s a lot that has to be worked out. If that’s our only option we’ll adapt, but it’s going to be tough.”
Fox agreed that much football in such a short time could exhaust players mentally and physically.
“Anyone who’s ever played football will tell you that you want to take at least two weeks off of football before you do anything else,” he said. “If the state championship is at the end of May or early June, you’re looking at having to start playing again in a month and a half. The main thing is that we as coaches need to understand that if they’re making the right decision we have to adapt. I have to figure out a way to make this fun and make sure we’re all on the same page and taking care of the kids.”
The idea of moving football to the spring has begun to gain some traction nationally, as the National Junior College Athletic Association announced July 13 it was moving its football season to the spring, while some other states are also considering moving football to the spring.
If football is moved to the spring, Fox and other area coaches are hoping they’ll still be allowed contact with their players through the fall and winter, even if it’s just weightlifting and conditioning.
“I’d be very disheartened if they cut it off completely and said we could resume in February because then we’d lost everything we’d worked for up until this point,” Fox said. “My hope is that if that happens, we’ll go back to contact days. Even if they give us two weeks in August (before moving the season to the spring), that’s two weeks of progress we’d have.”
For smaller schools like Columbia, a full flip of fall and winter sports would be crucial, as making multisport athletes choose between two different-in season sports could be a death blow to some sports.
“I think you have to flip all fall sports and spring sports to be even come close to making this work,” Ward said. “It’s a tremendous undertaking and I think, especially for small schools like ours, it would have to start with a full flip. We can’t have kids choosing between sports or otherwise we’re going to end up not having enough kids to play certain sports.”
Even with all the changes and potential headaches that could come with a spring season, Ward, like every other coach in the state, would adapt to anything if it meant having a football season.
“I think if it was a choice between playing in the spring and not playing at all, every coach is going to choose to play in the spring,” he said.