BY CHRIS FORTUNE
Athletes at Eudora High School continue to practice with extra motivation as a cloud of uncertainty looms over the fall sports season during the coronavirus pandemic.
To combat the spread of the virus as much as possible, Eudora athletes participating in fall sports go through a coronavirus symptom questionnaire and temperature check before practice. Students arrive in masks that are also worn during practice and equipment is sanitized after every practice.
“We’re doing everything we can to keep our kids and our coaches safe and we’re moving forward until the day that may come along where someone shuts us down,” said Eudora High School Activities Director Cara Kimberlin.
Fall sports practice at Eudora High School began Aug. 17, and head football coach Sean Hayden said he observed better performance and more energy in practices when his players realized they had a chance to play this season.
“Once they got a green light to go, these have been the best practices I’ve ever been around in 10 years coaching because they know this could be the last practice or this might be the last game,” he said. “They’re gonna play hard.”
Hayden said his players are taking their safety seriously and doing what they can to stay on the field during a season without any guarantees of when it may end.
“I feel for them, the emotional roller coaster they’ve been on and hopefully we can have some stability going into this season,” Hayden said.
Seniors that aren’t highly recruited are looking to make an impact during their final year of high school as they attempt to earn a scholarship, and Hayden stressed the importance of this season for them.
“I have kids that need this year, and they need this film. They've done everything, they had a great offseason, but they need this year to maybe get a scholarship and maybe that scholarship is what gets them to go to college and gets them their degree,” he said. “This is bigger than football. Some of these kids need that.”
Darren Erpelding, boys' soccer head coach, urged his players to do their part by continuing to wear their masks outside of practice and prevent putting their season in jeopardy.
“We don’t want a kid going out in a Eudora soccer shirt and say he goes to our Kwik Shop and then our superintendent walks in and he says, ‘Where's your mask?’” he said. “We want to be doing things right all the time.”
Like the football team, Erpelding noticed an improvement in his players when they realized that they had a chance to play this season.
“As soon as the board approved that we could go ahead and play, I noticed a real difference in the boys’ attitudes,” he said. “They were excited, they were energetic.”
Erpelding said they are taking each practice one at a time and his players are not wasting any of their moments together.
“They do practice like it’s their last. They take everything in, they're not taking anything for granted,” he said.
Susan DeVoe, head coach of the girls' and boys’ golf team, said Eudora High School fielded its first golf team last spring. Girls’ golf is typically played in the fall, but since it wasn’t offered last fall, girls were able to play on the boys' team last spring. It was among the other spring sports that were cut short last year as a result of COVID-19. The boys’ team will begin practice again in the spring.
“We only got to practice three weeks with the boys' season, which was the first golf season in the history of Eudora, so we only had three weeks of what I would have called maybe normal,” she said.
DeVoe said her players are wearing masks and are now in groups of three rather than four to help with contact tracing. She is hopeful everyone will follow guidelines to prevent more positive cases, which could end the season prematurely.
“Ultimately, what's going to happen is people will either follow the rules, do what they need to do and we can go on, or they choose not to and that's when things get out of control and we get more positive cases, which then impacts our ability to come to school or play sports,” she said. “I am super hopeful that everyone just follows the rules.”
The Kansas State High School Activities Association’s board of directors voted Friday to approve an “alternative fall season” if schools need to cancel the regular season due to COVID-19. In the approved proposal, the alternate season would take place in the spring and there would be no postseason.
Lawrence Douglas County Public Health moved to phase yellow as of Thursday, which recommends K-12 schools offer hybrid instruction and no high-risk activities that involve close contact between participants, such as football, soccer and dance.
Information on the current phase can be found here.
The Eudora School Board will meet tonight (Monday) for a special meeting following the change in phasing from public health.
Reach reporter Chris Fortune at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
We rely on donations to be able to cover the city of Eudora. Please email us at eudoratimes@gmail.com if you are willing to show your support to continue our journalism.
コメント