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Graham pitcher Sierra Martin hurls the ball to Cummings High School's Brianna Wilkins.
Times-News
Times-News
Hoping to finally hear a proverbial starting pistol in the form of the go-ahead from Alamance-Burlington Schools, high school sports instead remain stuck in the starting blocks following Monday night's board of education meeting.
Expressing concerns about safety, consistency and equity, the board discussed at length a presentation from ABSS athletics director George Robinson that would've allowed Alamance County prep athletes to start conditioning and workouts with their teams for some sports as soon as this week.
Ultimately, the plan was not brought to a vote. With high school students scheduled to continue on a remote-learning course through at least the end of the first semester in January, board members said they found it hard to justify permitting athletes on campuses for workouts when they aren’t allowed in school buildings for instruction.
Athletes remain sidelined in what Tuesday became the 200th consecutive day away from organized team activities since the North Carolina High School Athletic Association suspended spring sports March 14 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m struggling terribly with sending children back to athletics and not putting them in a school building,” board chair Allison Gant said. “It’s not that I don’t believe they should not have that opportunity, but how do I answer the public? I see your presentation, I see your reasoning. How do we justify that we can have athletics but we can’t put your child back in a school building?”
Sharing similar concerns as Gant, board vice chair Brian Feeley said he’d like to see a “defined metric” for coronavirus cases in Alamance County established, one to be met before allowing team workouts.
“I would be much more comfortable if this proposal was coming to us after a benchmark that we hit, meaning when the positivity rate is at ‘X percent’ for an extended period of time, that we'd be able to do it," Feeley said. "We could be doing all the protocols in place, but the lived experience of each child, the lived experience of each staff member and coach is going to come into the athletic space that we create, the environment that we create. So until there's a documented sort of metric of the community spread that's out there, it seems to me very premature to do it. I understand all the benefits.
"Those same benefits, you can just delete the top slide ‘benefits of athletics’ and put ‘benefits of in-person instruction, benefits of the arts, benefits of dance programs, benefits of math club,’ and we're not doing any of those extracurricular activities, but we are going to do it for athletics? So I'm having a very hard time reconciling the consistency without having to do some thought pretzel to just say, ‘Yeah, it’s OK to do it because of these benefits.’ Well, there are these exact same benefits with every other aspect of our educational ecosystem. And we're applying it a bit inconsistently here, in my opinion.”
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Board member Patsy Simpson, who shared that a family member of her own is on a high school sports team in Georgia that now has an outbreak of coronavirus cases, voiced her concern about the possibility of that very thing happening in Alamance County.
“How do we ensure the other parents that these children who’ve elected to (participate in athletics) will not bring potentially COVID into the school system?” she asked.
Board member Wayne Beam referenced the multiple COVID-19 outbreaks among college football teams across the country, already forcing more than 20 games to either be postponed or canceled.
“If Clemson and some of these places cannot keep their athletes from getting COVID, how are we going to do it?” he said. “Yet who am I to sit here and say, ‘Our kids shouldn’t be able to play volleyball.’ I don’t know the right answers to all this.”
The board is scheduled to meet again Monday, when discussions involving both athletics and return-to-school plans will continue.
“We’re not going to move forward with this until the board has had some continued conversation and has made a decision about where we are with a return to school,” superintendent Bruce Benson said. “That timeline that had the potential for something happening this week, that’s not going to happen.
“I’m saying to the board that we will have continued discussion. I think that this should also be informed by the direction the board decides to go with regarding to return to school, which we will continue on this dialogue on Monday.”
More than three hours after the meeting started, Robinson took to the lectern to make an impassioned pitch to begin high school sports workouts in Alamance County as early as Wednesday for cross country and volleyball.
“I’ll say this as a personal aside, for me, if it wasn't for athletics, I wouldn't be here,” said Robinson, a Williams High School alum and former Cummings High School boys’ basketball coach. “My mom and dad, God bless them, they have a lot of gray hair and that’s because of me. And the reason they got that gray hair is … some of the stuff in school because I wasn't focused. Sports was a way for my coaches to stay on top of me, ‘Hey, I noticed you were falling off in so-and-so’s class. What's going on?’ And so I think there are some of our kids that really, really need that.”
Robinson referenced a quote from Charles Barkley, the basketball legend and Hall of Famer, underlining a belief in the power of sports during periods in which divisiveness persists.
“We're talking about demographics of people and socioeconomics and what you look like. He said, basically, ‘I don't care what you look like or where you come from, can you play?’ ” Robinson said. “What athletics does for us is it breaks down a lot of barriers that we have in our community right now. Not just this community, in our society in general. I feel like athletics gives us a break from that. One, because I'm going to go watch a football game, but then two, it gives our kids an opportunity to see folks that maybe don't look like them, or don't have what they have. But we're all in the boat, rowing in the same direction towards the same goal.”
Per the plan, conditioning and training activities for cross country and volleyball targeted Wednesday as a start date. Basketball and cheerleading were scheduled for Oct. 12, football for Oct. 19, boys’ soccer and lacrosse for Oct. 26, boys’ and girls’ golf, boys’ tennis, girls’ soccer and softball for Nov. 9, and baseball and wrestling for Nov. 30.
Swimming and diving wasn't included in the schedule as Burlington’s Maynard Aquatic Center, which normally plays host to multiple Alamance County teams, is currently unable to do so, Robinson said.
Citing safety as the county athletic department’s top priority, Robinson presented a plan more stringent in its recommended restrictions than that of the state’s governing athletics body, the NCHSAA.
The plan limited the number of athletes for indoor workouts to 15, as opposed to the NCHSAA’s 25, and 30 for outdoor workouts, rather than the 50 set by the state association. Face coverings were to be mandatory, not just recommended, and locker rooms and weight rooms would be closed for workout activities.
Precautions included workout pods of 15 athletes each for contact tracing purposes, sanitary measures for students and equipment, temperature checks, face masks to be worn at all times when not engaged in physical activity and an online system for pre-screening questions.
Robinson referenced 7-on-7 football events and “sandlot ball” he’s seen across the county involving high school students who weren't wearing masks or taking proper precautions. He said the county would be able to provide a safer environment for kids to compete while under the watchful eye of coaches.
“One of the reasons that we felt the need to get back is the kids are already doing sports anyway,” he said. “But what we found is that they were doing it in a more irresponsible (way). We could do it safer. A few weeks ago, I got some feedback from an event they had down at the Mebane Arts Center. They were doing 7-on-7 football, which is fine, it’s good for kids to be active, but I didn't see any masks. I know they didn't take temperatures and they also had spectators. There were almost 400 people there.”
Robinson presented a list of 11 surrounding school systems, of which nine have already started workouts or have plans to do so later this week. Those include Guilford County, Winston-Salem Forsyth, Rockingham County, Randolph County, Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County.
