For the first time in what seems like a very long time coaches, student-athletes, fans, and we in the media received much needed positive news in the midst of the world changing coronavirus pandemic.
Finally, proper and safe steps are being put in place for the hope of Texas High School athletics this fall.
On Friday, the University Interscholastic League released requirements and guidelines for its member schools to begin limited UIL summer strength and conditioning on June, 8.
Here’s the link to the guidelines.
https://www.uiltexas.org/athletics/covid-19-strength-conditioning-2020
This is the news coaches and athletes have been clamoring for before there world was shaken up in March. Since that time coaches and athletes have only communicated through this years most popular phrase “zoom”.
Who would have thought the Gruver boys basketball team along with a host of other schools would be sent home a day before competing at the UIL state tournament.
Who’d ever imagined the last UIL athletic event was going to be March 14. So many seniors across the state saw their season cut unexpectedly short without true closure.
It’s been a long, snail’s type pace for two plus months, or 70 days to be exact. It’s felt more like two years without school and sports however, lets commend the UIL for its efforts through uncharted waters.
There wasn’t a playbook on how to handle this situation. There is no right way to handle the unpredictable COVID-19. The UIL took safety measures into play and did the best they could, and continue to do so.
For the foreseeable future nothing will be the normal we knew before.
These guidelines, though fair, are strict. But at the end of the day, whether it’s 25 percent capacity in a weight room, or an athlete wearing his workout clothes to practice, there will be summer workouts, which a month ago seemed out of the question.
Keep thinking positive, keep being educated with your involvement during this coronavirus pandemic and most of all be safe. With these proper steps being taken no doubt we’re on our way to seeing football, volleyball and cross country this fall. I can’t imagine a world without Texas High School Football. Could you see every stadium dark on a Friday in September. I don’t want to.
This photo was taken by Georgia Tech student Thomas Carter. The 102-year-old photo shows fans packed in a campus stadium in the midst of a pandemic wearing masks with a smidge of social distance between them on concrete seats. [Thomas Carter/ Associated Press]
Associated Press writer Dan Gelston wrote a fantastic column Friday with the historic photo attached of fans watching a college football at Georgia Tech’s Grant Field. Fans were wearing mask’s in the stands during the deadly Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.
If football was that important then, how important is it now?
I feel it’s important enough that the UIL and its member schools will take these summer workouts serious so they can prove themselves and do everything in their power to have a kickoff come late August in 2020.