USA TODAY International Edition
HS football proceeds in some states
The risk of playing high school football during the coronavirus pandemic now has a name: Jacob Lemaire.
An offensive lineman at Teurlings Catholic High School in Lafayette, Louisiana, Lemaire has been hospitalized after being infected with COVID- 19 and developing pneumonia and spent four days in an intensive care unit, his mother, Tricia Lemaire, told USA TODAY Wednesday.
Jacob “is still on oxygen but he’s doing really well,” she said, while Jacob’s older brother, Mark, was on a ventilator.
Tricia Lemaire said Mark, 19, has asthma that likely contributed to the complications but that the family was surprised by what’s happened with Jacob, 17, who was practicing with the football team for about a month before he was infected with COVID- 19.
“He works out a lot and he is in good shape,” she said. “So that was kind of shocking, that it hit him that hard. Hard enough to be hospitalized. And now I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. It is very scary to me.”
Larkin Spring, a senior running back at Teurlings, said he and his teammates have been praying for Jacob Lemaire every morning since learning Lemaire had been hospitalized.
“It’s scary,” Spring told USA TODAY. “Whenever this all started, like I really never expected it would be hitting somebody I knew so closely, so hard.”
Teurlings is tentatively set to resume practice Monday, according to assistant coach Bart Vitte.
A large number of high school football teams across America, including in hotbeds such as Florida and Texas, are moving forward during the pandemic despite the risks.
Longview High School in East Texas was among those teams that practiced this week despite a recommendation issued July 1 by the state’s governing body, the University Interscholastic League ( UIL), that workouts be halted until Monday because of a spike in positive tests of COVID- 19.
John King, head coach at Longview High, said his coaching staff took precautionary measures, like requiring players to wear face masks in the weight room, practicing in small groups and enforcing social distancing guidelines. He said one of his 150 players had tested positive since summer workouts began.
“If they don’t work out with us, they’re going to work out somewhere else and they’re not going to follow those guidelines,” King said. “And I know our controlled environment is the best environment they need to be in.”
But King expressed concern when he learned about the hospitalization of Lemaire in Louisiana.
“That is the scary part; that is the risk we all take. I mean, players, coaches,” he said. “The thing I guess we don’t know enough about either is the side effects or lasting effects this virus has on anybody afterwards. And I know there’s not as many young athletes dying from it, but the effects it can have on their respiratory system and their heart is in question. That’s the scary part.”
The first games of the high school football season in Texas are scheduled to beginAug. 28, according to the UIL.
Florida also is among the states planning to allow high school football teams to play as scheduled this fall, and high school players are expected to compete Saturday in the Nebraska Shrine Bowl in Lincoln.
California, on the other hand, is among the states still undecided, with the California Interscholastic Federation set to announce a decision July 20. High school teams in Tennessee are barred from any contact drills until a COVID- 19 state of emergency expires Aug. 30, and no decision has been made about the football season.
“I really think in the next couple of weeks you’re going to see a lot of decisions,” said Bruce Howard, spokesman for the National Federation of State High School Associations. “You may have some states that in three or four weeks are going to be just fine to start football as normal. Maybe you’ll have some states that can’t.
“Certainly there’s been some talk about the concept of swapping fall and spring seasons, and I think that the more they think about that the more complex that becomes. You can see the thinking caps are certainly hard at work.”
Jon Ellinghouse, head football coach at Sierra Canyon in Southern California, said private schools like Sierra Canyon might consider playing even if the CIF can’t find enough schools to play the season.
“We could do our own thing,” he said. “( But) my best guess is that we’re going to play in January, that they’re going to delay it and push it back and then everybody will play in January. God willing, it gets a little bit better.”
Iowa is the only state to sponsor high school sports in the summer, and it might offer a glimpse of complications to come for football teams.
The baseball and softball seasons in Iowa were originally supposed to begin in May, but the novel coronavirus pandemic put both sports on hold until Gov. Kim Reynolds green- lit their return for June 1, starting with practices, followed by games two weeks later.
In the six weeks since high school sports returned to Iowa, things have been bumpy.
As of Wednesday afternoon, as many as 26 baseball teams and 22 softball teams have been impacted by COVID- 19 infections or exposures, according to officials at both the Iowa High School Athletic Association, the state’s governing body that oversees boys’ sports, and the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, which oversees girls’ sports.
The protocol calls for a two- week quarantine, which means no games or practice for the team, if a player or coach tests positive for COVID- 19.
Of the roughly 335 teams playing baseball, 120 – or about 36% – began this week having played 10 games or fewer. Woodbine, one of the state’s smaller schools, didn’t start play until June 22 because a player tested positive for the coronavirus during the first two weeks of practice.
Western Dubuque had its baseball season suspended in the middle of a July 1 game against Cedar Rapids Washington. Western Dubuque led 6- 1 in the top of the third inning when school administrators learned through contact tracing that one of its players may have been exposed to COVID- 19.
Dowling Catholic in West Des Moines learned Wednesday that a member of the baseball team tested positive for COVID- 19, causing both the baseball and softball programs to miss the remainder of the regular season as well as the postseason.
In Lafayette, meanwhile, Larkin Spring said he and his teammates at Teurlings Catholic are hoping Jacob Lemaire and Lemaire’s brother get better. Spring said he communicated with Jacob Lemaire on Tuesday by Snapchat.
“He was just sending me funny filters and kind of being himself,” Spring said. “He’s talking about how he keeps ripping out his little IV thing, so they have to keep putting it in. He’s like, ‘ I’m tired of getting stuck.’ He’s just being himself.”
Spring said Lemaire hasn’t talked about the possibility of rejoining the team and that another football player has tested positive for COVID- 19. For now, Spring said, he and his teammates expect the first game of the 2020 high school football season to take place Sept. 5, as scheduled.
“But that could change any minute,” Spring said, “you know?”