Leila Manuel is rarely without her soccer cleats. The
10-year-old does drills at a field near her home on days with no practice and
wears her club soccer jacket everywhere.
اضافة اعلان
“She identifies as being an athlete,” said her mother,
Solmaz. “Soccer is her favorite thing.”
For many athletic kids like Leila, the last year of social
distancing has meant sidelining not only school and friendships, but also
sports. For five months, Leila’s San Francisco team canceled practice
altogether. Then it was another six months of no-contact drills.
Last week, though, Leila finally got to scrimmage again —
the beginning of what she hopes will be a normal spring season.
After a year of stops and starts and changing levels of
COVID-19 precautions, many youth players are back on the field and court this
spring. And the safety measures that teams are taking vary widely.
So what are coaches and parents doing to keep sports safe
this spring? And how are they prioritizing safety without compromising the
things that make sports so important: social connection and fitness, but also
fun?
The spectrum of safety measures
In San Francisco, Leila’s soccer club, Girls Unite, is
taking careful precautions. Coaches, spectators and kids all wear masks, even
while playing. Parents are distanced on the sidelines, and players must fill
out digital health forms before each practice and game.
“Parents are entrusting me with their children,” said
Lindsay Kauffman, Girls Unite’s founding director. “It’s absolutely my
responsibility above and beyond any game to make sure their kids are happy and
healthy.”
In Frisco, Texas, on the other hand, a Little League game
looks no different from how it looked five years ago, said Andrew Rah, a
recreational youth soccer and baseball coach. On his 7-year-old son’s baseball
team, all masking and social distancing requirements have been dropped. Parents
sit in the bleachers unmasked.
“The feeling around here is that outside is safer than
inside and baseball is a totally outside sport,” Rah said. “We’ve been happy
with the way sports have been run here and happy with the normalcy we’ve been
able to have compared to a lot of other places.”
There are many factors to consider when making decisions on
sports and safety, said Sankar Swaminathan, chief of the division of infectious
diseases at University of Utah Health and a member of the medical advisory
committee for the Pac-12 Conference, one of the five major Division I
conferences in collegiate sports.
“Where’s the worst place you can be?” Swaminathan said. “In
a small bar with a lot of people without a mask who are talking and singing.
And the best place you can be is by yourself on a mountaintop. Every other
activity lies somewhere between those two.”
When making decisions about sports and safety, parents and
coaches should consider transmission rates in their community, the safety
protocols the sports league is taking and whether the activity is outdoors.
Consider also the risk to society, including other kids with compromised
immunity, he said.
Playing volleyball and soccer outdoors and masked is
relatively low risk, Swaminathan said. Same goes for sports with minimal
contact, such as cross country, swimming and tennis. Indoor basketball is
higher risk, he said, but if people are masked and there’s no crowding in the
showers or locker rooms, that risk goes down.
Creative approaches to playing
Eric Worley, co-founder and program director of Philadelphia
Youth Basketball and Philly Triple Threat, a sports-based youth development
program serving young people from underserved communities, also requires his
players to mask up at all times, even on the courts, which are indoors. Early
on, players were uncomfortable wearing masks while playing, he said. “But as
time has elapsed, it’s become quite normal.”
In May, all of the gyms in the city that his teams used for
practice — in recreation centers, district schools and local college campuses —
had been shut down. Leagues in nearby suburbs simply switched to private
facilities, but Worley’s organization rented the floor of a armory, converted
it into two basketball courts and set up a basketball-themed learning pod,
where children complete virtual schooling during the day and play pickup games
during breaks.
Teams are taking other creative approaches to safety in order
to stay active this spring. Kauffman prepares “PPE kits” for all of her soccer
coaches to use in practices and games. Kits include extra disposable masks,
gloves, disinfectant spray and hand sanitizer.
At GMS Gymnastics in Manassas, Virginia, the gymnasts, who
are separated into pods, carry their personal items around the gym in a milk
crate. Using hand-held machines they call “foggers”, coaches sprays a
disinfectant mist onto the balance beams, uneven bars and floor mats between
pod rotations. Parents aren’t allowed inside at meets, so they watch their
kids’ events on Zoom from the parking lot.
‘Let’s help them have joy’
Al Bazley, president of the Florida’s West Tampa Little
League, which reopened this spring for the first time in nearly a year, said he
has seen more financial hardship among families this year than ever before,
meaning sponsorships and donations are down. To save money, he personally
pressed 250 jerseys rather than rely on third-party vendors.
“The job loss is really gut wrenching,” he said. “It’s hit a
lot of people hard.” And while baseball can’t fix their problems, he said, it
does provide a sense of normalcy.
It’s the inclusiveness that helps children, Bazley said.
“It’s the cheering and the sounds when you go up to bat and you make a good
play and all the parents go nuts and you feel this sense of accomplishment.”
Kauffman encourages parents to have perspective this season
and to forget about the wins and losses.
“Let’s just help them have some joy and be active,” she
said. “These kids just need fun in their lives right now.”
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