A step forward, half step back

By suspending the bylaw, teams can now schedule games on Sunday, as long as their regularly scheduled date was impacted by COVID-related issues.

“The temporary suspension of this bylaw is only for competitions and not for practices or any other team activities,” said a release on the CIF website. “If a CIF competition is postponed directly due to documented COVID-19 cases (or the quarantining resulting from such cases), the schools involved in those competitions may mutually agree to Sunday(s) to reschedule those competitions.”

This is good news for high school basketball leagues around the state because it gives them a little more wiggle room to get an entire season played.

“The problem is, our schedules are already so full, by the time you get to January, you’re pretty much out of (scheduling) options,” said Sequoia athletic director Melissa Schmidt. “Having one more day gives you more options.”

Many leagues have already suspended the start of league play, including the Peninsula Athletic League, which postponed its first two league games, rescheduling them to dates later in the month. In the case of the PAL North Division, a game was moved to early February.

“[Rescheduling those games] gave us a little more breathing room,” Schmidt said. “If we were going to be playing (basketball) games (Wednesday), we would have been really scrambling to figuring things out.”

It would be naive to think, however, that these will be the only games postponed this season. As such, schools and teams will be hunting for dates to squeeze in these make-up games. It could be the difference between a three-game week and a four-game week.

While scheduling options opened up, the number of spectators allowed at these games was being closed down. Schmidt she received an email from CCS commissioner Dave Grissom Wednesday indicating that the Centers for Disease Control had changed its spectator policy, cutting the number in half allowed in a gym.

“CDC has just changed it,” Schmidt said. “A mega-event went from 1,000 to 500 for indoor (events). You can’t have more than 500 people in the gym, otherwise you have to check vaccination cards.

“As far as I know, (high school) districts are having conversations now on how to implement this. We may go to something like we did last year (which was just allowing four family members from the same household). But we have not adopted that policy yet.”

At the end the day, all the changing conditions are being made to help ensure that players can stay on the court and games get played.

But it’s not the same. For this year’s junior class of basketball players, they have never played a high school season without the looming presence of the virus.

“I feel bad for the kids. The kids were really excited about going to being able to go to basketball games and being able to play in front of their fans,” Schmidt said. “Only (this year’s) seniors have seen a normal school year. There are plenty of kids who never played in front of fans in our gym”

If there is any silver lining to any of this it’s that administrators now know how to deal with issues that have come along during the pandemic.

“I do think the good thing is we do have experience of seeing what we saw last winter,” Schmidt said. “It’s better than nothing. All of it is better than nothing.”

Nathan Mollat can be reached by email: nathan@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: 344-5200 ext. 117. To report scores or tips, email sports@smdailyjournal.com.