Weeks of speculation turned to reality Monday when the California Interscholastic Federation, the state’s governing body for high school athletics, announced that the fall sports season is being delayed until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The revised calendar calls for CIF football playoffs to be held April 17, with section playoffs scheduled for no later than April 10. But even as drug manufacturers worldwide take aim at vaccines and treatment for the virus, there is no guarantee the pandemic will be less widespread in December or January, when practices are scheduled to begin.
Basketball, normally played during the winter months, will be woven into the spring season. The CIF playoffs will end on June 19, one week after the completion of the section playoffs.
Most of the CIF championships, including football and basketball, will be regional rather than regional and state, CIF executive director Ron Nocetti told this news organization.
“We didn’t want to do anything that would limit the section championships from being played in their entirety if at all possible,” he added. “I think that’s why you saw the limit to the state events to just one week.
“Some of our sports go straight to state events, like cross country, wrestling, track and field and swimming and diving. The others will be regional-based events.”
If there are no adjustments, basketball would go two consecutive seasons without a state championship because the pandemic caused the cancelation of last season’s state finals in March.
“With all of the things that we’re dealing with, I think that’s the least of everyone’s concern is a state championship,” Miramonte girls basketball coach Kelly Sopak said. “They want to get a season in for the kids and whether it ends in sectionals or NorCal, that’s great.”
California joins New Mexico as the only states thus far to postpone high school sports until 2021 because of the virus that has infected nearly four million and caused 143,000 deaths in the United States.
Section start dates for traditional fall sports will begin in December or January, according to the CIF.
“What started out with multiple plans came down to the one that everyone thought gave as many opportunities to as many students as possible to have close to a full season,” Nocetti said.
The CIF tweaked its bylaws to allow athletes to compete in high school and club sports simultaneously, which is forbidden with sometimes severe consequences in a normal calendar.
Some coaches didn’t anticipate the CIF combining winter sports, which in addition to basketball include soccer and wrestling, with spring sports. Many figured that the state would choose a model of three truncated seasons, perhaps as short as eight weeks in length.
“I’m surprised,” Saratoga football coach and athletic director Tim Lugo said. “I began hearing rumors about the move into two seasons. I was concerned for the multi-sport athletes. This will hurt some sports and kids will have to choose which sports to play.”
The news Monday comes a little more than five weeks since the CIF announced that it would offer an alternative calendar by July 20 if it was determined that fall sports could not begin as scheduled.
Baseball, softball and track and field championships are the last events on the CIF’s new calendar, each scheduled for June 26, about a month later than a normal school year.
“Given our current state of our pandemic, I have to be cautiously optimistic,” Archbishop Mitty girls basketball coach Sue Phillips said. “While the calendar is in place, some things have to fall into place still.”
At the time of the CIF’s June update, coaches and athletes across the Bay Area held out hope that conditions would improve and administrators would decide that it was safe to play. Some schools were given the green light to start modified outdoor conditioning and others soon followed.
But as COVID-19 numbers in California dramatically spiked in recent weeks and many school districts elected to begin the fall academic term with distance learning, it became clear that the CIF would have to push pause on the upcoming season.
“Last week when the governor announced that schools on the watch list would be starting the year in distance learning, the numbers I am hearing that could represent 80 percent of our population,” Nocetti said.
Given the grim forecast, there were only a few questions to be answered Monday. What would the CIF’s new calendar look like? And would the state’s 10 sections build their calendars around the updated state model or — and this seemed unlikely — go their own way?
The North Coast Section, the local governing body for schools stretching from the East Bay to the coastal side of the Oregon border, announced that its calendar would mirror that of the state. Football practice can begin Dec. 14 and games can start Jan. 6.
“There were some that thought it was really ambitious,” NCS commissioner Pat Cruickshank said after a meeting with his executive committee Monday morning. “Starting Dec. 14, they hope we can do that. We’re going to have schools that are going to be challenged for a variety of different reasons. But for the most part, especially from our executive committee, they were in agreement with it.”
The Central Coast Section, which has a jurisdiction that extends from King City to San Francisco, is expected to unveil its plans Tuesday after an executive board meeting.
Los Gatos football coach Mark Krail said he is grateful that the CIF and sections have moved forward with new calendars.
“The easy thing would have been to cancel everything,” he said.
The fall postponement is not unprecedented. During the Spanish Flu pandemic a century ago, the CIF’s Southern Section held its football championship in March of 1919.
With Monday’s announcement, COVID-19 has now officially affected all three seasons of high school sports in California.
On March 12, a day after the NBA suspended operations, the CIF canceled its state basketball championships scheduled for that weekend in Sacramento.
On April 3, the CIF pulled the plug on spring sports, which had been on pause since mid-March.
Now, the hammer has dropped on the most popular sport — football — a decision that had one high-profile coach thinking in nostalgic terms on the eve of the news.
“This is looking like the first fall I’ve had without football since 1993,” De La Salle football coach Justin Alumbaugh wrote in a text Sunday night.
Twenty-seven years ago, Alumbaugh was in eighth grade.
