COVID provides a lot of uncertainty as to what lies ahead for students in the next few months. Sports, prom, and graduation are all out on the table.
“We’ll reevaluate as we get closer to see what is going on in the area. The cases in the area right now are so high, and we met with public health and they really wanted our help to try and keep school from being an area where cases spread,” athletic director Jay Weinman said.
With this in mind winter sports will plan to happen, just not until we come back to school. However, spectators may still be kept to a minimum.
“The Coulee Conference discussed this, and we decided to go with the similar thing that we did for volleyball, and that it would be a limited number of spectators and immediate family only,” said Weinman.
One sport that is going to be a challenge during the time of COVID is wrestling. Wrestling is a direct contact sport that requires a person to touch another from a different school away from the six feet apart. Masks are also at risk of falling off during a match due to the contact of the sport.
“As far as we can tell it’s transmitted when we breathe. And so then when you think about it in those terms basketball may be worse than wrestling in that sense,” said Weinman, “In wrestling, it’s just two people and then they’re done. Whereas basketball you might be face to face with five, six, seven, players from the other team, and that’s causing us some pretty big dilemmas on how to do that safely.”
Following in school-year order Snowball Week and the Class of 2022’s Junior Prom is next. Due to COVID, students have not been allowed a prom last spring or homecoming this fall. School dances have been a no-go.
“It’s just hard to say what’s going to happen between now and then. I mean if you think about when we first had to react to the pandemic in March, you know, two months from March, April, May, we were kind of in the thick of things. And, you know, so I don’t know if it’s going to be different this time around,” said Principal Tom Chambers.
Uncertainty still lies ahead as even the administration can’t guarantee what will happen in the future. On the flip, side one thing students can look forward to is a football season. Although this year the season will look a little different, the boys of fall will still continue just now as the boys of spring.
“We’ve started to schedule games. We start with Arcadia and GET, and they both have turf fields, and so we’ll be playing there to start because we are not sure what our snow situation will look like, and it’s easier to remove the snow from a turf field than from a grass field,” said Weinman. “We’re starting to meet with other schools and secure games so hopefully by mid March we’re playing football.”
Like the Class of 2020, COVID is predicted to stand in the way for the Class of 2021’s graduation. However, this time the administration has a course of action.
“My hope would be that we would be in a spot where we can have a fairly normal graduation ceremony. At the very least, we’ve done it before, in a pandemic last summer in July. This year we would have a lot more lead time so if we need to do it similarly to what we did last year, we could do that more at a more normal time,” said Chambers. “We definitely are going to have a graduation ceremony, whether it looks more like what it did last July or whether it looks more like what it did the June prior to that and most other ones.”
