FOOTBALL20
a new way
TO PLAY
From Staff Reports
Sports in the
time of COVID-19
The spread offense has been replaced with spreading out,
and social distancing has become bigger than going the distance
on a football field.
Hand sanitizer is more important than having good hands.
Forget screen passes. It’s all about screening and temperature
checks.
Helmets and pads are still vital equipment but nothing is
more significant than wearing a mask.
This is all part of the new normal in the brave new world of
football — a world where a vaccine is the new Hail Mary pass,
and being “all in” means staying apart.
And as high school football returns
to Texas and the Golden Circle, players,
coaches, parents and fans will all take baby
steps on a new journey no one anticipated
down a road no one could have imagined.
No one was ready for the COVID-19
pandemic.
No one.
And no one knows what kind of football
season we will have. We do know there
will be two seasons. The UIL, the governing
body for all high school extra-curricular
activities, including all sports, wrestled
with the dilemma long and hard before
making the decision to allow athletes to
participate in voluntary summer workouts on June 8 — a decision
that came with a mile-long list of safety protocols.
Then in late July the UIL, which listened to a variety of options,
including moving all fall sports to the spring and moving
baseball, softball and other spring sports to the fall, announced
there would be high school football in the fall. That announcement
came with a breakdown of two seasons — a season for
smaller schools (Class 1A through Class 4A) and a season
for bigger schools (Class 5A and Class 6A) that would start a
month later.
Seven of the eight schools in the Golden Circle (Mildred,
Rice, Blooming Grove, Kerens, Frost, Dawson and Hubbard)
began with summer practices on Aug. 3 with their opening
games scheduled for Aug. 28. Those were the original start-up
dates for all schools.
Corsicana, the only Class 5A in the Golden Circle, won’t
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