A Roadmap For Resuming Sports For Fall Is Still A Work In Progress

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

It's July Fourth weekend and nobody really knows what's going on yet. 

Not with school openings in the fall. Not with high school sports. Or college sports. Or professional sports. 

Everything is on the table, in little broken pieces. The people who administrate sports are in consultation with public health officials. This we know. 

Sports in the fall will be impacted. This we know. 

How much? It's anyone's guess right now and the start of September is less than two months away. 

Peel back the layers of the onion for a moment. State boards of education. State athletics and activities associations. School district superintendents. Football. 

Somewhere deep inside that onion is the relatively modest, benign sport of cross country. 

Cross country as a thing has a lot going for it right now. It's outside. It's a healthy activity. It's inclusive. It offers a social setting, mental health advantages and instruction. 

Most everyone can agree that putting young athletes back together with their coaches is a good thing. Fifty states may roll out cross country in 50 different ways, but all know that it needs to happen. NEW YORK POTENTIAL SCENARIOS

Coaches' surveys, workgroups, Zoom meetings and brainstorms have piled contingency upon contingency. 

Maybe it's all going to be dual meets and triangulars. Maybe there will be no out-of-state travel. Maybe invitationals will have to be canceled. The Manhattan Invitational? As of today, that seems pretty far-fetched.

Maybe the entire season is filled with training and goals are shifted to, what, Strava segments?

Maybe there is a qualifying event (district, sectional, regional) and state meet at the end. And that's it.

Maybe there is no Nike Cross Nationals or Foot Locker Championships. 

Maybe the only way to do it is to time trial — like the Tour de France or cross-country skiing. Run off the starting line with your team, socially distant from all of the others ... and then merge the results at the end. 

Postal Nationals, anyone?

There are so many maybes, and some of them you can even get on board with. 

But the people charged with making the decisions are looking at the calendar right now and they are seeing the number of cases spiking across the United States. The timing of two days in a row over 50,000 new cases nationwide is not good. 

The number of daily deaths is receding a bit. That's good. The virus itself may be getting easier to transmit but less lethal. 

Sounds better, right? But when more and more people get it, the layer of insulation around vulnerable groups (older and with underlying healthy conditions) gets thinner and thinner. 

In March, remember, it took the confirmend infection of Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert to hastily shutter the NBA, the NCAA basketball tournaments, Major League Baseball, all concerts, spring sports, church and school. 

An overreaction? That will be debated for a long time but there is no denying that the Coronavirus filled U.S. hospitals to capacity, put front-line health care workers at exceeding levels of risk, and led to far more deaths here than anyplace else around the world. 

There is more information to work with now than in March. 

But still, so many complicated variables to work out and not a lot of time to do it. 

If a high school or college opens in late September, will it move to a combination of in-person classes and online instruction? Three days at school, two days at home? What does that mean for after-school sports? 

If one athlete is confirmed to have the virus can it send an entire team into a 14-day quarantine?

If half of a state is open for business and the other half is still shut down, do some schools get to participate while others can't?

And then there's this: What if high school and college football is shoved to next spring? Will states (or the NCAA) be inclined to flop the other sports as well? Could cross country be pulled into spring as well?  

In some places, that could happen. 

The Ivy League is expected to make an announcement July 8. The California Interscholastic Federation is making a determination by July 20. Those decisions will be influential, for sure. But they also have to be made in hundreds — or thousands — of places in the U.S. 

And the numbers of confirmed cases keeps rising. 

Return to normalcy? It's going to be a while.