Aug 10, 2020 5 min read

High school football practice was supposed to start throughout Pennsylvania yesterday with heat acclimatization workouts. That was the plan until last Friday, when the PIAA called a two-week delay to those practices.

That’s OK, because from what we’ve seen, passing games and kicking games in the state have never been better.

The PIAA, Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration, Pennsylvania Department of Health and Pennsylvania Department of Education each have been taking turns kicking the topic of fall sports in the commonwealth down the road. They’ve been kicking it for so long the road must look as lengthy as Route 40.

Each entity, when given an opportunity to make a firm decision on if high school sports will, or will not, be played this fall has taken a passive-aggressive approach and passed the buck to somebody else. They’ve been passing more often than a run-and-shoot quarterback facing a 21-point deficit.

It’s time to make a decision, folks. And stick with it.

The kids, whether they are football players, golfers, cross country runners, soccer players, etc., deserve to know if the season they’ve been planning and training for during the 90-degree heat of summer is going to happen or not, if it will be played in the fall or spring. Adults are leaving these kids hanging and that’s not fair or right.

It’s obvious nobody in a position of power wants to make the decision to cancel fall sports or move them to spring because they don’t want to be considered the bad guy and take the heat from angry students, parents and even coaches.

So they pass the buck.

The PIAA announced in July that fall sports will go on as scheduled and two weeks later approved a set of guidelines for each sport. The WPIAL went a step further and announced the start of fall sports will be delayed several weeks and the seasons shortened. Football, for example, will start Sept. 11 and has been cut to seven weeks.

Finally, somebody making a decision, or so we thought.

Gov. Tom Wolf then said Thursday he recommends high school and youth sports not be played until January. Wolf made the comment at the end of a news conference for a separate subject, quickly exited the room before followup questions could be asked and later issued a news release in which he described the recommendation as a necessary precaution to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“The administration is providing this strong recommendation and not an order or mandate,” Wolf’s news release stated.

In other words, he thinks it’s medically risky and unsafe to play sports but also doesn’t want to be the person who makes the call to stop them. Thus, no mandate or order banning high school sports until 2021. The buck was officially passed.

That same day, the Department of Health and Department of Education released a joint statement supporting Wolf’s recommendation and added, “As with deciding whether students should return to in-person classes, remote learning or a blend of the two this fall, school administrators and locally elected school boards should make decisions on sports.”

The buck was passed again, this time to school boards.

Then, on Friday, the PIAA reversed course and said it was delaying fall sports for two weeks so it can engage in dialogue with the governor. PIAA executive director Bob Lombardi said, “we were surprised as anybody else” about Wolf’s recommendation.

Surprised? Why? Shouldn’t somebody from the PIAA have been in contact with the governor and Department of Health long before this and gotten their official stance on the situation? Lombardi’s comment made as much sense as a NASCAR driver saying he wrecked because he was surprised the track had left-hand turns.

All the PIAA’s two-week delay does is kick the can down the road and pass the buck again. Ultimately, it seems, local school boards will be left to make the decision about high school sports. In the eastern part of the state, where COVID-19 cases have been significantly more numerous than on this side, the Philadelphia Public League announced Monday all of its sports have been postponed until January. Locally, Uniontown School District last week decided it would not allow the “contact” sports of football and soccer. The WPIAL, meanwhile, announced Monday it strongly supports the PIAA’s two-week delay and plans to move forward with fall sports. WPIAL executive director Amy Scheuneman called Gov. Wolf’s recommendation “uncalculated, inconsistent and unfair.”

That we’ve reached this point is mind-boggling. We’ve been living in this pandemic since March. The situations are not new to us as nothing about them has changed in the last five months, yet every decision seems to be made on the fly and without consultation with those in charge and those they will impact.

And where are the contingency plans? Has anybody said why contact sports such as football and soccer can’t be moved to spring?