‘Order in the chaos.’ High school soccer, volleyball adjusting to new normal.
Between the birth of his daughter that morning and the news from the Kentucky High School Athletic Association that it would attempt to play its fall seasons on a delayed schedule, Henry Clay boys’ soccer Coach Jason Behler’s phone would not stop buzzing Tuesday.
“It was crazy. I finally just turned my phone off,” said Behler, who led the Blue Devils to the state championship last year. “I was getting texts from people asking if the baby was here yet, and at the same time, everybody was texting me about KHSAA stuff. And I was like, ‘Nope. I’m just going to be in the moment here (with his family).’”
But the next day, the happy father and coach opened his email and began fleshing out a new team schedule now that the Blue Devils have lost more than half their games due to the new, later start date of Sept. 7 forced by the coronavirus pandemic. Henry Clay has 18 games posted on the KHSAA website. Eleven of them were before Sept. 7. Behler thinks he can boost the schedule back to 13 or 15 games before the playoffs are set to start in October. The KHSAA moved the soccer postseason back a week to allow for a couple more games.
“There’s going to be a lot of jostling to do to get in district games and city games and some games are just gonna have to be canceled,” Behler said, noting that his plans to host the West Virginia state champion were already scrapped amid the pandemic and that his team will have to forego a planned trip to Columbus, Ohio, as well.
Effect on volleyball
High school volleyball faces similar difficulties with a different twist. Volleyball teams often are able to rack up a lot of games during weekend tournaments. Now, out-of-state travel is limited and the number of teams that can be at any one site has been reduced to eight.
Paul Laurence Dunbar Coach Jennifer Morgan had a team trip to Phoenix, Ariz,. on the schedule as well as three more multi-team events closer to home. Still, she said her team, a longtime 11th Region power, has almost the full number of games the KHSAA will allow in the new, shorter season. But she’ll have to do some shuffling.
“If I don’t change anything to my schedule, if I play it as it plans out right now, we have 27 games within the time frame they gave us,” Morgan said. “With that being said, I can’t do that because I’ve got to change some district games and stuff. And there’s some teams that we had early on that I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that we are able to play because they’re very competitive teams within the state.”
When the KHSAA set the Sept. 7 start date, it was based on the notion that most teams in all sports would be able to play about 80 percent of their original schedule.
“How (teams) schedule early and late is their choice and they can reschedule,” KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett said in an interview with the Herald-Leader on Wednesday. “They’re not bound to anything that they originally scheduled, unless they’ve got a contract, and we’ll even help them there. Nothing about competitive fairness came into play. This is all about ‘can we play during this pandemic.’”
‘Thrilled’
Morgan and Behler said the scheduling issues are secondary to just being able to play.
“I was thrilled,” Morgan said. “I think at this point you could have told me we were playing whenever and I would have been thrilled. Like anything with COVID, you’ve just kind of learned that you can’t take anything for granted and be very thankful for what you do have.
“It’s important to seniors, but not only to seniors but just everybody — the well-being of all student athletes to get back to normalcy. And, hopefully, with this, if we can go — well then maybe there’ll be a day where we can get back in school, and we can start dealing with more normalcy and learning to live with COVID.”
While having dates on the calendar is a huge step, Behler said he was sending a note to his team to make sure they are keeping their expectations realistic.
“I think that it all still needs to be taken with a grain of salt,” Behler said. “We have to understand that a lot of this is in the community’s hands, as much as it is in coaches or players or anybody else. And the KHSAA is not going to put kids in unnecessary jeopardy, or coaches, or their families or anything like that.”
Potential conflicts
Both soccer and volleyball have vibrant club seasons where many of the top high school players continue to play on select teams in the winter and spring. Behler said high school soccer could be potentially delayed to a November to February schedule, but any later might cause conflicts for players who play club soccer or multiple sports in high school.
“You’re just gonna run into kids who would choose club over high school,” Behler said. “Not to say that some might not choose the other way, especially if they’re seniors who want that senior year. If they don’t need the (recruiting) exposure or are not playing college or whatever, some of them might choose high school, but it would be a very different season, I think, if you’re going to make kids choose between those two. And I just don’t see any way that you could possibly train for both.”
Volleyball must also deal with being an indoor sport. Though it has been deemed “low contact” by some health authorities, there’s still concern about players and any number of fans being confined in a gym for an extended period of time. The KHSAA in its actions Tuesday called for the elimination of double- and triple-headers that would involve back-to-back-to-back freshman, JV and varsity games, a common occurrence in volleyball. The KHSAA said it could allow multiple games if gyms were emptied and cleaned between games.
“I think it all goes back to, you know, how creative can you be being safe,” Morgan said. “Maybe we don’t have the tri-matches. Maybe we don’t play freshman, JV and varsity on the same night. I can see there kind of being a complete different freshman, JV and varsity schedule where you are kind of working still as a team, but you might play people on different nights.”
Time of uncertainty
Both Behler and Morgan indicated they’ll gladly accept their new logistical problems over the experience of the last several months during the pandemic.
“It’s funny. A week ago, everything was up in the air.” Behler said. “I didn’t know what was going on with school or soccer or when the baby was gonna get here. And now, everything is here. And yet there’s still more questions that are unanswered than answered. So that’s, I think, sort of going to be the theme of this season and this year: What people can do in this time of uncertainty, you know? Who can sort of make a little bit of order in the chaos.”
