The wheels, slowly, are starting to turn towards a high school football season.
The Arizona Interscholastic Association, counseled by its Sports Medicine Advisory Committee, announced Thursday a lowering of the community-spread benchmark for contact in practice and competition from 10 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population to 75 per 100,000. The change came after the AIA saw positive results in states that have already begun high school competition, and its significance can’t be understated.
“That 10-for-100,000 marker would hold everybody up,” Canyon del Oro coach Dustin Peace said. “A few weeks ago, when that got posted, one coach pointed out that Vermont was the only state to have below 10 per 100,000.”
Remaining under 75 per 100,000 isn’t a certainty — Pima County jumped from 49 to 72 recently — but the AIA’s decision breeds optimism.
The Amphitheater School District authorized its three teams — Ironwood Ridge, CDO and Amphi — to practice with helmets starting Monday. The schools’ athletic directors will meet the same day to discuss their schedules. Still, coaches say the AIA’s recommended start date of Oct. 2 is probably wishful thinking.
“Not Oct. 2nd; maybe Oct. 16, maybe a week after that,” Peace said. “We’ve got to have so many days of contact and then we can play a game.
“High school football is going to be the first thing that enters a group setting of that many kids. We’ll have 45 kids on the field, and essentially this is new ground — not just for sports but for the school in this pandemic.”
The district might be one of the best equipped to handle such a situation.
All three schools are similar in size. Ironwood Ridge is in Class 5A, one level above Amphi and CDO. The coaches know each other well. Peace is in his 12th year at CDO, and Jorge Mendivil is in his seventh at Amphi. While I-Ridge coach James Hardy Jr. is only in his second season, he previously served on Peace’s staff.
Ironwood Ridge head coach James Hardy told his players “You have this opportunity. Don’t let it go to waste.”
Having a roundtable with just three seats has made it easier to communicate.
“Talking with some of the other coaches around town, I would say that’s safe to say,” Peace said. “I’m able to talk to our district AD anytime I want to talk to him. So our communication has been really good. But at the end of the day, I think Pima County is all going to be one as far as when we play.”
All three coaches, along with many of their colleagues, wrote a letter in July to the AIA advocating for a spring season. At the heart of their complaints was a desire for some certainty.
Now, for the first time in a long time, they seem to have some.
“It’s nice to get to the point where we can start practice-planning and getting things set in stone to move forward and get ready for the season,” Hardy said. “I told them today, ‘Hey, you guys told me how much you wanted to get back to playing football, and now you have this opportunity. Don’t let it go to waste.’”
