High school sports are back in Boise Schools. Here’s how it plans to keep kids safe.
High school sports can resume in the Boise School District starting Tuesday amid record-setting coronavirus case numbers and a health care system on the brink of rationing care.
The Boise School Board unanimously approved a plan to start its winter sports Monday night, one of the last school districts in Idaho to do so.
Small-group workouts can start Tuesday, and full-team tryouts in basketball, wrestling and cheer and dance will follow Dec. 22. A shortened season would start in January.
“If you want to keep this going, you need to take this seriously,” Boise School Board President Dave Wagers warned Monday night. “That’s for students, coaches and athletic directors. This is public health on the line, and we’re giving you a little rope. Let’s make it work.”
Boise Deputy Superintendent Lisa Roberts said during Monday’s meeting the plan came with approval from the district’s advisors from St. Luke’s and Saint Alphonsus hospitals. She said the hospital advisors warned sports increase the chance of COVID-19 spread, but they also acknowledged the mental health benefits sports bring students.
“They expressed that the protocols in our plan truly were pretty rock solid and tight as far as being able to mitigate that spread,” Roberts said.
BOISE’S PLAN TO COMBAT COVID-19 SPREAD
The approved plan includes 10 required protocols teams and athletes must follow. Highlights include:
Face masks are mandatory during practices. They are allowed during games and competitions.
Teams can only have 12 minutes of close contact during practices, such as full-court scrimmages or live wrestling.
Programs must maintain cohorts of two or three athletes outside of those 12 minutes.
Temperature checks and self reporting of symptoms are required before entering school facilities.
Practices can not exceed 90 minutes.
“This entire plan is not something that we take lightly at all,” Timberline Area Quadrant Director Brian Walker said during Monday’s board meeting. “We take this very seriously. And from a health and safety standpoint, our expectation for our coaches and everyone involved with winter sports is that this plan needs to be followed to the letter.”
Boise School District Activities Director Jon Ruzicka said maintaining those small cohorts will be key to keeping sports running with high community spread of the coronavirus.
He gave examples of wrestlers only working out with only teammates in their weight class, or having basketball players run through drills at their hoop with their cohort.
“That cohort group is going to be crucial to keep groups small and help us with quarantining and contact tracing if we get to a positive case,” Ruzicka said.
WHEN CAN HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS START?
Small-group workouts can begin Tuesday. They are optional and are limited to 10 or fewer people, including coaches.
Tryouts will start Dec. 22. Boise School District Activities Director Jon Ruzicka said teams will use multiple gyms, and possibly even multiple schools, to ensure no more than 18 students are in a gym at one time.
Girls basketball teams can start playing games Jan. 5. They will be limited to 10 regular-season games.
Boy basketball teams can start games Jan. 8. They will also be limited to 10 regular-season games.
Wrestling teams can start duals on Jan. 6 with a maximum of eight duals before the district tournament.
Cheer and dance teams can start performing at games starting Jan. 6 in order to prepare for their district meets.
The shortened seasons will leave Boise teams at a competitive disadvantage with its opponents around the 5A Southern Idaho Conference. Teams in the West Ada and Kuna school districts are already playing games, with some girls basketball teams already having three games under their belt as of Monday.
The Nampa School District, home to Skyview, sidelined all of its teams but plans to review that plan at a board meeting Wednesday.
SPORTS AND THE CORONAVIRUS
Sports have remained a hot-button issue during the coronavirus pandemic. Central District Health, which oversees Ada County, recommended as early as October 15 stopping all sports where social distancing is not possible.
The Boise School District did not follow that advice as fall sports neared their district and state playoffs. But it did put all winter sports on hold Nov. 12 after rising case counts and quarantines forced the state’s second largest school district to move all classes online until January 19.
Central District Health originally proposed ordering all youth and adult sports to stop in its four counties Dec. 4. But it backed down from that order. Its latest proposal says sports “may continue.” A vote disrupted last week by protesters is scheduled for Tuesday.
Central and Southwest District Health, which oversees Canyon County, both recently named sporting events as one of their Top 5 exposures for COVID-19. But nailing down exactly who caught the disease where is difficult with a virus spreading at record levels. Central District Health is weeks behind in its investigations, CDH spokesperson Brandon Atkins told the Statesman earlier this month.
Southwest District Health also advises pausing all sports where 6 feet of distancing isn’t possible.
“We’re not going to have a precise number,” Atkins said. “That’s what the public needs to hear. The data isn’t going to be solidified until months down the road.
“Even then, we’ll miss some of it because we have so many cases that are happening right now the investigations are falling through the cracks. We’re only able to contact people in a higher risk population right now because we’re seeing close to 3,000 new cases a week just in our jurisdiction.”
The spread of the coronavirus has only intensified since then. Ada County’s seven-day average of new cases reached 418.7 on Monday, according to the Idaho Statesman’s tracking of publicly available data.
That’s a 53.3% increase since Dec. 1.
Hospitals have also warned Idaho is on pace to trigger crisis standards of care by the end of the month, giving several Boise school board members pause at putting students back in gyms.
Beth Oppenheimer said she struggled with hearing from players and parents how important sports are, then seeing photos on social media of basketball players at a party with 40 other people.
“Our hospitals are nearing capacity,” Oppenheimer said. “But I don’t think that allowing our kids to play sports for an hour and a half a day is going to put us over the edge.
“But it really is everyone’s responsibility to do what they need to do outside of the gym. So if this can help limit the kids and parents and coaches to do what’s right outside of the gym, then I think we should do that.
“But, you know, we’ll do it until we can’t.”
This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 8:53 PM.
