Inside one high school team’s quarantine, and a season against public health advice
Thirty-eight minutes into the 2020est high school basketball practice you can imagine and the head coach addresses what all of us have been thinking about on some level.
You should see this, too. Twenty-six people on a Microsoft Team meeting. The Staley High boys basketball program practices through broadband now, the team forced into quarantine by a positive COVID-19 test after the second day of work.
Some of a virtual high school basketball practice is what you might expect. Most of the athletes appear to be in their bedrooms or basements. One has a pop-a-shot machine behind him, which you have to admit is a nice touch. Another just got out of the bathroom, the flush broadcast across the Northland.
“C’mon, mute your mic please, man!” someone jokes.
Staley has a long relationship with COVID-19 disruptions. The Missouri State High School Activities Association cut its big-class basketball championship before the semifinals in March. Staley was supposed to play Chaminade in Columbia. That was so long ago, back when we were told not to touch anything. Wear gloves, even. Masks weren’t really a thing quite yet.
Now, Staley basketball is among the first high school programs in the country to have two seasons affected by the pandemic. A kid felt achey after practice, his mom took him for a test, and the positive result shut things down for two weeks.
Two weeks. Remember how long two weeks felt in high school? Staley coach Chris Neff hopes these virtual practices help everyone stay busy.
“I don’t want you to feel like we’re getting behind here on quarantine,” he tells his players. “We’re growing.”
This is the best thing a coach can say. Be patient. Stay positive.
But as COVID cases spike across Kansas City and much of the country, another point has to be considered: why are winter sports like basketball and wrestling happening while health experts advise against them, and while many schools are closed to in-person instruction?
‘Keep people safe’ and provide ‘normalcy’ for kids
They’re doing what they can. High school basketball teams eliminate some road games, and separate practices to diminish potential spread. You can’t socially distance in wrestling, but you can give each athlete a full-time practice partner so that a positive test wouldn’t necessarily shut down the entire program.
Here’s an idea: maybe it’s time for high school teams to pod up. Form groups of four, and only play each other. Anything to keep the inevitable positive test from becoming 12.
That’s if you think high school sports should be happening at all.
“The truth is we’re in a really bad situation right now in this country,” said Zach Binney, an epidemiologist from Emory University. “People are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that things are not all right right now, and getting substantially worse, and we’re going to have to make some really difficult choices.”
At least at the moment, those difficult choices do not include canceling winter indoor sports. Districts across the metro area are holding sports, including Kansas City Public Schools, where classes remain online.
In Johnson County, public health officials “strongly recommended” — that was their specific term — winter sports be canceled. District superintendents meet with county health officials regularly, though the advice on winter sports is being ignored at least in part because of pressure from parents, athletes, and coaches.
But this is interesting: the Wyandotte County Health Department shared data from the four school districts there that held fall sports showing case numbers for students involved in sports or other school activities were far fewer than other students, or even staff.
More current data was not made available, but some in schools are encouraged that this means students can participate and be kept safe.
Schools do have some advantages with winter sports. More information. Access to testing that didn’t exist for fall sports. And, hopefully, more recognition of how quickly teams can be shut down.
“The ultimate goal is to keep people safe and still provide some type of normalcy for these kids,” said Dan Clemens, North Kansas City superintendent and president of the Missouri State High School Activities Association board of directors. “Their social and emotional well being needs it.”
Shawnee Mission superintendent Mike Fulton made an important point in a board meeting this week. Schools are proving to operate relatively safely. Case numbers are generally low. The problems are generally about exposure from other places. Fulton’s point, then, was that schools are being put in an undeservedly difficult spot.
“If we want to address this we do it as a society together,” he said. “It’s an unfair burden placed on us to make decisions that no one else in our society is making.”
Those decisions are here anyway, though, and we keep coming back to this truth: perfect options do not exist. Err with caution and keep kids home, but will they really stay home? And what will be lost? Go too far on the other side and schools will contribute to spread, and seasons might be lost anyway.
Kelly Donahoe has lived this, and has a rare perspective. He is the Rockhurst High football coach and a cancer survivor. He’s built a professional life around high school sports, and has a condition that puts him at an elevated risk for COVID-19.
Rockhurst had another good team this year — 5-3 when it had to forfeit a district playoff game against Joplin because of a positive test.
Rockhurst had at least two players opt out of the season because of concerns, and Donohoe believes his program did all it could to stay safe. He’s coached 24 years and described telling his kids the season was over “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”
Still, he said he’d do it again. Maybe he’d put a camera on the sideline, a longshot attempt at contact tracing to avoid a season ending forfeit. But other than that, he’s glad he said yes.
“As devastated as our kids were, those eight weeks together playing, the relationships, the great moments, you can never ever take that away from us,” he said. “We got that opportunity and will forever cherish that. Just give them a chance. Try everything you can because it’s so worth it for the kids.”
Where’s the line?
Those same emotions and beliefs are why these men and boys logged onto that video call for Staley High basketball. Viewed coldly, purely scientifically, yes — this is crazy. Maybe even reckless.
High school aged kids are at relatively small serious risk, though some heavy complications have been recorded and a 13-year-old Missouri boy recently died of coronavirus complications.
But cases are hitting new records seemingly every day. Hospitals are running out of beds. A 16-year-old high school athlete may feel light symptoms if he feels anything at all, but he also has parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. This is what they mean by community spread.
Nobody wants to be the source of an outbreak, and sports teams are more public than watch parties and social gatherings that experts say are driving the current surge.
But at some level, public health is being trusted to high school kids who may feel invincible or be hesitant to cause a shutdown by admitting symptoms, and to coaches who are by nature hyper competitive and protective of their programs.
Where’s the line?
The answer is different for each of us, and different depending on the moment. This month, across the country, many who have presumably spent 2020 urging others to distance and mask gathered in large crowds to celebrate Joe Biden’s presidential election win.
At Notre Dame, college football fans stormed the field to celebrate a win over top-ranked Clemson. They were promptly admonished by many, including school president John Jenkins, who recently tested positive for COVID after being seen a White House event without wearing a mask or distancing.
Teams and leagues allowing fans at games have drawn criticism from people who’ve been silent as museums and indoor restaurants opened. We all have our own priorities, and it’s easy to want the lines drawn accordingly.
My wife and I have two kids in school right now, and maybe you think we’re irresponsibly causing daily potential exposures. Our older son was looking forward to a basketball league, but we pulled him out and maybe you think that’s being paralyzed by fear.
Listening to Binney, it’s impossible not to see that we have grossly mismanaged this disease to the point that it is worse than ever eight months into restrictions. Playing basketball or wrestling right now is way too close to the band playing after the boat hit the iceberg.
Listening to Donohoe, it’s impossible not to see that we need to hold onto the most important things, to continue to live a life worth living. Maybe high school basketball doesn’t mean anything to you, but maybe that wedding you went to doesn’t mean anything to Neff’s players.
The problem, then, is that the risk is shared but the rewards are specific to each of us. Your decisions affect my risks. The same is true in reverse. But you don’t have my same rewards, and I don’t directly see your risk.
We’re talking past each other. We’re connected, but not acting like it. We share the same space, but too often behave like it’s all ours. That’s a huge part of the problem.
Huge part of lots of problems, actually, with consequences far greater than anything that can come from high school basketball.
This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.