Despite Covid Outbreaks, Youth Sports Continued

NEW ORLEANS – As a coach in a sport where social distancing is impossible, Andrew Nicola said he has done everything he can to keep the students on his wrestling team safe during the pandemic – in following the rules on spectator restriction, disinfecting mats between rounds and requiring wrestlers to change into clean shirts between each match.

So he was alarmed in January when his team from Brother Martin High School in New Orleans arrived at the Louisiana Classic wrestling tournament to find crowds of spectators clustered closely together, many not wearing masks.

Mr Nicola angrily demanded that the tournament organizers kick out those who did not play by the rules. “I went to see them personally and said, ‘You have to fix this problem, and it hasn’t been fixed,’” he recalls. “I was very upset because I knew this one was going to cost us dearly.”

Less than a week later, more than 20 students, staff and spectators who attended the tournament had tested positive for the coronavirus, an outbreak that prompted sports officials in Louisiana to suspend the remainder of the regular season fight.

A year after the coronavirus crisis for the first time, with closed athletic fields and darkened school gymnasiums, students, parents, coaches and officials struggled to tackle the challenges of youth sports, putting balances concerns about the transmission of the virus against the social, emotional and sometimes financial benefits of competition.

For months, a tangle of rules and restrictions that vary by state and sport forced players and coaches to adapt. Vaccine deployments and warmer spring temperatures have prompted some states to lift mask mandates and relax guidelines, but health experts continue to urge young athletes to be cautious about the spread of possibly variants. be more contagious from the virus.

Officials have linked the Covid-19 outbreaks to ice rinks in Vermont, Florida and Connecticut, while a January report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that two high school wrestling tournaments in Florida led nearly more than 80 people to be infected with the virus, including one deceased adult. In Minnesota, at least 68 cases since late January have been linked to participants in school-sponsored sports and clubs, including hockey, wrestling and basketball, according to the Department of Health. the state.

In at least some cases, the spread did not occur during competition, but during team gatherings. Recent data from the NFL and CDC revealed that transportation and shared meals were the most common causes of the virus spreading among sports teams.

“Now is not a great time to invite people over for a post-game pizza party,” said Dr. Susannah Briskin, associate professor of pediatric sports medicine at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland.

Dr Briskin is at the center of the debate on youth sports – both at work and at home. She helped draft recent recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that young people wear masks both during games and when traveling with their teammates. (The group has allowed some exceptions for contact sports where masks could be a choking hazard, and individual sports where athletes can maintain a safe distance outside.)

But when his 11-year-old son’s football league rolled out an indoor mask mandate after the association’s guidelines were released in December, Dr Briskin said, “They’ve had so many negative reactions, they went back and made it optional.

Her club kept the requirement, so she let him continue to play. And her teenage daughter’s school basketball team needs masks during practices, she said – but not on the field during games, but her daughter wears one anyway. Both of her children are learning remotely, Dr Briskin said, and needed a sporting opportunity.

“It was very important to invite them to be social and to be physically active, but trying to encourage it in the safest way possible,” she said.

Many experts agree that sports for young people are important for physical and mental health. This means that school athletics has continued in some places, even when students are learning virtually. And some schools and athletic associations, including those in Ohio and New Jersey, have also relaxed academic eligibility requirements for student athletes. In Kentucky, a state Senate bill would allow students to redo a year of schooling to make up for academic losses, while giving high school athletes a fifth year of eligibility.

Audrey Mann, 17, a high school student from New Orleans, hasn’t been in a classroom since last March. She chose to remain a distant student even after the city’s school buildings reopened in the fall, before closing again amid an increase in cases and then reopening in recent weeks.

But there was no way she would give up athletics, Audrey said. She played volleyball and soccer in the fall, and softball and tennis now fill her afternoons after school, followed by club soccer practices that last until 8:30 p.m. Her weekends are over. also filled with club football matches, which were moved to the spring as a result of the fall pandemic restrictions.

“Sport for me is a huge mental thing,” said Audrey, who has a 4.0 GPA and is the captain of her three varsity teams. “I need to exercise and go out. It’s the only way I’ve been social in this past year.

For parents, the potential impact of athletics on their children’s future has often played a role in decisions about play time.

Willandria Middleton, a high school librarian in Montgomery, Alabama, was worried about the repercussions of banning her son, William, 17, from playing high school football. “Everyone was scared, like, ‘Oh my God, if he gets it he might die,’” she said. “But I thought, well, to stop him – would that kill him too, if he can’t play what he likes?”

Her son’s high school is over 80% black, and she said she agrees with William’s coaches that football provides much-needed structure for him and his teammates. “A lot of our young black boys playing football here in Montgomery, that’s all they have to do,” Ms. Middleton said.

There were cases of the virus at William’s school and at least four school district employees, including one of his coaches, have died after battling Covid-19. But the football team ended the season without any outbreaks – perhaps, William said, because its head coach demanded that players wear masks everywhere and forbade them from attending classes in person. “If you weren’t in training or at games, he didn’t want you to go out.”

For William, the pandemic season has paid off. In December, he received a football scholarship to a junior college in New Mexico. “I just wanted to use my abilities so my mom didn’t have to pay for me to go to college,” he said.

Some children and families, however, have made difficult decisions to make it through the year.

Tyler Bihun, 18, a high school student from Bloomington, Illinois, and his twin brother have been playing hockey together for about 13 years. But they decided to stay off the ice after seeing opposition to face masks at their local indoor rink. “We just didn’t think it was very safe and we didn’t want to expose our parents,” Tyler said.

The brothers also chose distance learning despite being able to return to class two days a week.

Looking back, Tyler said he had no regrets. The travel team he used to play with had a Covid-19 outbreak that forced training and games to be canceled, and one of his former teammates was seriously ill for two weeks, did he declare. “I miss hockey, but giving up was definitely the right decision.

In Louisiana, where the wrestling season was disrupted by the tournament epidemic but where the state championship was still held, athletes and coaches were forced to adapt to a multitude of safety protocols. Handshakes were banned and social distancing and face masks were necessary when students were not participating.

Julie Castex, a clinical nurse specialist in New Orleans who works in infectious disease research, said leaving her son, Ethan, 18, to struggle in his senior year of high school comes at a “risk-benefit” basis. The family eventually decided that keeping him away from the pigtails would hurt his sanity too much.

“It’s scary because you let your son participate in contact sport,” she said. “And while you look at the data and think he’s probably doing fine at his age, there’s a risk. But everything else was basically taken away in his senior year, and wrestling is pretty much all he has to do, that was to be expected.

Eddie Bonine, executive director of the Louisiana High School Athletic Association, said officials had worked hard to protect students and staff, but admitted there had been obstacles in the way.

“Our schools have done their best, and it doesn’t always work properly,” Bonine said, adding, “Once people come through the doors, some of the masks come off.

Still, he said the state’s overall record was good and that although more than 4,700 people attended the state wrestling championship at the end of February, no cases were reported. “We are learning to live with this virus,” he says.