High School Sports: Preparing for a long-awaited return of spring sports

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Talk about starting over.

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In the (hopefully unlikely?) event that some high school sport seasons are not permitted to resume this spring, it will mean sports like track, soccer, slo-pitch and tennis will share an unfortunate fate: falling victim to the pandemic for a third consecutive season.

Contrast that to sports like cross-country running, boys baseball, girls flag football and golf, where to varying degrees, participation has been uninterrupted and/or trending higher, and you can quickly understand how unbalanced the deleterious effects of the pandemic have been.

Begs the hypothetical question: where will these sports be when they are permitted to return?

Given a three-year absence, it is entirely likely that a school coach will be faced with the prospect of starting up a team without a single student on that team having practical high school sport experience in that activity.

Yikes.

This will mean starting from scratch — a new focus on recruitment, more time and effort teaching fundamental skills, and new effort on team-building.

Granted, this is worst-case territory for these sports, and we’re certainly hopeful for a full and unfettered return to competition this spring.

Hope may well reign supreme that interest will bounce back to where it was before the last full season, which for these sports was (gasp) in the spring of 2019, but the reality will likely be that getting there will take a whole lot of time and effort.

For our students’ sakes, I certainly hope we’ll be up for the rebirth when the time comes.

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High school notes

While certain sports, like girls volleyball, alpine skiing, snowboarding, Nordic skiing and boys and girls curling, have been given the green light to resume training this week, as of today, boys and girls hockey and boys basketball still await their chance.

Alpine/snowboard training started this week, and the first of two Nordic prelims slated for Feb. 3 at Windy Lake.

As soon as return to gameplay dates have been announced/approved in support of team sports, online coaches meetings will be called to discuss alternatives to salvage their season. And this is where we’re all going to need to be creative and open-minded …

Dave Makela is the athletic administrator for the Sudbury District Secondary Schools Athletic Association. His column runs weekly during the high school sports season.