Yes to sports, but no to school? Why should KHSAA make sense when nothing else does?
As I sat down to watch the Zoom meeting of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association to decide whether to play sports next week, a friend texted.
It’s not safe enough to meet in person, but kids can play sports? he said.
A few minutes later, KHSAA board member Lucy Moore put her finger on it too.
“We will have a hard time explaining how we cannot be in school and can still play sports,” she said at the Thursday morning meeting. “It puts us in a really hard spot ... if we say they’re not safe to be in school, can we say they’re safe to be in sports?”
Nonetheless, after a tortured procedural meeting, the KHSAA board members voted to move ahead with the current plan to start sports practice on Aug. 24 and competition on Sept. 7, even though Gov. Beshear asked schools not to start until Sept. 28 because of increasing rates of COVID-19. Nearly all the private schools and some public schools completely ignored him, and maybe they will again if he rules against the KHSAA decision. Why not? The current inconsistent, crazy, patchwork of rules and regulations of a society that’s trying to navigate a pandemic is enough to drive anyone crazy.
No wonder everyone is mad at everyone else. Nothing makes sense — we can’t have school, but we can have sports, we can’t have meetings, but it’s OK if the Kentucky Derby invites 20,000 people to Louisville to watch a horse race (after this column was posted online Friday, Churchill Downs changed its mind about those fans) or if two high school football teams spew sweat and phlegm over each other. We open bars the same week that 30,000 UK students move back to Lexington. We will have fall soccer but no marching band competitions? Many club sports and Little League teams, including that of Gov. Beshear’s son, are playing right now, but high schools sports are not.
Of course, none of us have ever lived through a global pandemic before, and we’re more or less making it up as we go along. Many of us don’t know anyone who’s been sick, much less died, and very few children have gotten sick or died, which I guess makes it alright until it’s yours.
It seems to me that maybe we should have started with what should have been our society’s number one priority: To get kids back in school where they can get educated, get fed, get taken care of, see friends and yes, do sports that are undoubtedly also good for them, and let everything else flow from that decision. But that would have taken much more care and discipline than we appear to be capable of since we were hardly willing to wear masks, much less stop congregating at bars.
At least high school sports is not just about money, like the current college football discussion appears to be. Like the Derby, the SEC has determined the show must go on, but mostly just for the big donors. College football makes lots of money for everyone involved except the athletes, so the justifications that it’s somehow safe is spread wide and deep. But college football, professional in all but name, has nothing at all to do with the main priority of educating students so these spurious arguments are all too transparent.
On Thursday, the brilliant Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post noted that some coaches seemed to suggest football could safely continue once all the regular students were moved online. “In about five more minutes the self-obsessed operators in the Power Five conferences are going to argue that we’ve got to get students off our campuses to keep football safe,” she wrote. “That’s the collective, ancillary kind of sick we’re dealing with in the novel coronavirus pandemic.”
I don’t envy Gov. Beshear or Dr. Stack, who just got thrown another fun hairball to untangle. (On Thursday, Beshear said he was “surprised” by the KHSAA decision and would take some time to make a decision.) Sports are important, too important to a lot of adults, but still major for our kids in their ever more fragmentary world of computers and isolation. Really, with all we’ve lived through so far this year, why not just push sports back to Sept. 28 and let kids keep practicing as they are right now? People will get mad regardless, but at least it will be consistent. And that’s a lot easier to live with than the alternative.
This story was originally published August 21, 2020 at 9:33 AM.
