Latest EEA guidelines open door for high school basketball, hockey to play this winter

Those hoping for an MIAA winter sports season were handed good news to begin the weekend.

On Friday morning, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) released its latest sporting guidelines that govern youth, K-12 and adult amateur athletics. Most notably the document opens the door for high-risk sports including basketball and hockey to conduct an MIAA winter season.

Since the EEA began releasing sporting guidelines back in early July, it has placed recreational activities into low, medium, and high-risk categories. Across its first two updates, all sports labeled as high-risk were prevented from playing in any competitions due to the amount of deliberate and intermittent contact. That all changed on Friday, however, as the EEA further sorted those high-risk sports into those where lasting contact takes place between players as opposed to those where contact only occurs at certain points over the course of the game.

Indoor sports such as wrestling and competitive cheer that require constant contact to take place will not be able to be held this winter. All other sports, however, including basketball, ice hockey, swimming, track and field, and gymnastics can hold competitions. Only low-risk sports can still hold tournaments.

Another major potential development is football and rugby also being cleared to play since they are outdoor sports despite the fact they are ‘high-risk.’ Football is slated to take place in the ‘Fall II’ season after being postponed in August, while rugby is a spring sport.

Now, the individual MIAA sport committees will be tasked with developing modifications that help make those sports safe to play. Once the sport committee develops their modifications they will present them to the MIAA Sports Medicine Committee. They will then have to be approved by the MIAA COVID-19 Task Force and the MIAA Board of Directors.

One requirement will be for participants in all sports, with the exception of swimming, to wear face coverings.

“I am encouraged that we will be able to have some form of a winter season, but recognize there is still a fair amount of work for us to do at the state level,” Hingham Director of Athletics and COVID-19 Task Force member Jim Quatromoni said.

High school basketball coaches across the state were overjoyed on Friday afternoon as after months of being worried about not having a season at all, there is finally room for optimism.

“This is exciting and it’s relief as well,” Mansfield boys basketball coach Mike Vaughan said. “We’ve been waiting for this moment for a while. The ability to now maybe put any sort of season together is a big deal. This is a big day.”

Some MIAA athletic directors were left slightly bewildered by the EEA guidelines, not because they allow high-risk sports to resume competitions, but because they lack specifics over what modifications must be made to high-risk sports for them to be safe to play. This marks a clear difference from the fall when EEA guidelines explicitly stated that some sports could only be played if they met the “minimum mandatory standards.” While on the one hand this opens the door for these sports to be played without many in-game modifications, this more likely leaves superintendents and building principals more involved in approving whether their teams can play under the new sport-specific modifications as they oversee the amount of contact that takes place between kids within schools on a daily basis. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) still has their own guidelines within schools as it pertains to transportation that must be followed.

“Whatever modifications need to be made, so be it,” Vaughan said. “At this point, if you told me the kids had to run on their knees, that works for me. The important thing is that this is really healthy for the kids to be able to get back together playing with one another.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/32kQnDa