Fate of Kentucky high school sports faces another decision day
The fate of high school sports this fall in Kentucky meets another crossroads Thursday.
Will football, soccer, volleyball, field hockey, cross country, cheerleading and dance join golf in beginning normal practices and play amid the pandemic, or will there be another schedule shift as the state continues to try to limit the spread of COVID-19?
The Kentucky High School Athletic Association Board of Control will discuss its plan to bring sports back at a 10:30 a.m. special meeting Thursday to be broadcast live on its YouTube channel.
Barring changes at that meeting, fall sports are set to begin normal practice on Aug. 24. Soccer, volleyball, field hockey and cross country would begin play as soon as Sept. 7. Football games would kick off Sept. 11. All are operating under abbreviated schedules from what would have been normal seasons. Only golf has been spared in that respect because it’s considered a low-risk sport when it comes to the potential transmission of the coronavirus.
Some optimism
Last Thursday, KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett sounded optimistic in an appearance on WKYT with anchor Amber Philpott.
“(Board members have) a stated goal that they’ve never varied from: We’re going to have fall sports. Whether we do it that day, … I think, is still up for evaluation and final judgment at this point,” Tackett said. “We want to have a fall season. We are committed to having a fall season. We’ve just got to see when the best time is for that.”
The board picked Aug. 24 as a practice start date during another special meeting last month at a time when there was hope that COVID-19 cases would decline substantially. Gov. Andy Beshear imposed a statewide mask mandate and implemented other measures as cases climbed not just in Kentucky but nationwide.
Negative trend
A wider spread of COVID remains a major concern. Fort Knox and Fort Campbell high schools, which are subject to military rules, last week announced that their posts’ coronavirus threat levels meant they could not allow football, soccer and volleyball to be played this fall. College athletics conferences, including the Big Ten and Pac-12, also announced the cancellation of fall sports.
While neighboring states Indiana and Tennessee are set to play this week and Ohio on Tuesday announced it plans to go ahead with fall sports, in all, 16 state high school athletics associations have decided not to play this fall. Those include neighboring Illinois and Virginia. West Virginia has established a county-by-county alert system that means students in low-risk areas can attend school and play while students in higher-risk areas cannot.
Since that July KHSAA special meeting, the governor added a recommendation that all K-12 schools hold off in-person classes until at least Sept. 28, citing his increased concerns about the virus.
Most public schools are complying, but many private schools and all of Kentucky’s Catholic schools rejected that proposal, opting to open well ahead of that date. Lexington Catholic and Lexington Christian begin classes Wednesday.
The KHSAA won’t be able to similarly ignore advice from the governor as it gets its authority to manage high school sports directly from the Kentucky Board of Education.
Opposition
Critics of school and sports shutdowns say they are too drastic a measure considering the cost of high schoolers’ mental and emotional well-being balanced against the risk posed by the virus.
Louisville’s Male High School football coach Chris Wolfe made that argument in an impassioned post on Twitter on Monday afternoon directed at Beshear, the KHSAA and Jefferson County Public Schools officials.
“This is not a simple safety vs sports decision,” Wolfe wrote in a series of tweets. “It’s, fundamentally, health issues for both sides of the decision. Eliminating HS sports through arbitrary fiat does not eliminate the health risk to these young people. There will be physical, emotional and mental repercussions for years to come. While these health issues may not be covered with the same media zest that a COVID case generates, the families that you have overruled in forcing your decision to take precedent will have to manage the long-term consequences of the all-too-real mental and emotional damage caused by removing individual choice and in many cases destroying childhood dreams and aspirations.”
Earlier Monday, Jefferson County Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio acknowledged there was a possibility that the Jefferson County school board could decide against playing regardless of what the KHSAA does.
Tackett spoke to the difficulty of the issues facing the KHSAA board, as well.
“This is a board composed primarily of school administrators, so they’re on the front line of what’s going on,” he said last week. “They are certainly watching the data, and I think they’ll make an open and honest evaluation and try to do the best they can. …
“On the one hand we know of the psychological issues that have affected a lot of our students who lost the spring and lost the opportunity to be with their friends and be with their teammates. But it really wasn’t about the loss of a big trophy. It was about that part that builds them, that part that binds them.
“On the other side, as you look at all the health data, and you start thinking about that 16-year-old inadvertently, without symptoms, taking that virus home and suddenly infecting a grandmother or an older aunt or uncle. It’s a tremendous mental conflict between which one weighs more.”
Work put in
High school athletes have been able to condition and work on skills since June 15 under strict COVID guidelines. They cannot conduct game-like scenarios, hold scrimmages or tryouts or do many of the things that take place in a normal practice setting. And they can’t hold interscholastic events.
Tuesday morning, the Kentucky Football Coaches Association published a graphic on Twitter showing COVID statistics from 190 of the 223 schools playing football who participated in its survey. The graphic broke down positive tests for both athletes and staff over the last two months of teams being together in limited workouts. It showed 96 positive tests among 10,962 athletes and 17 positives from 1,760 staff for a purported overall positive cases rate of 0.00888, according to data provided from its participants
Though there was an instance in early July where an outbreak in Hazard was traced to a football weight room, positive COVID cases among athletes have caused a only few teams to shutter and observe quarantine rules. The vast majority of high school athletics programs have been holding these limited practices without incident, Tackett noted last week. It follows then that, perhaps, some sports could commence.
“These kids have been putting in a lot of effort,” Tackett told WKYT’s Philpott. “We’ve got six fall sports and 280 schools and we’ve had very few reported problems. … Our coaches, our athletes have done a fantastic job with this.”
This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 10:05 AM.
