The Florida High School Athletic Association has chosen to keep up with the 2020 high school soccer season, Board President Lauren Otero announced during the Monday Board meeting.
Concern over the increased spread of COVID-19 in the state of Florida sparked the Monday meeting, which lasted nearly five hours.
Dr. Jennifer Maynard, chair of the FHSAA Sports Medicine Advisory Committee (SMAC), presented recommendations for student athletes to return to play. Ultimately, SMAC recommended delaying the start of the soccer and women’s volleyball seasons until further notice.
SMAC also recommended a trio of benchmarks for large-scale and state recommendations to play again: 1) overall downward trajectory for positive cases, 2) a positivity rate of less than 5% for cases over a 28-day period, and 3) at least two weeks of practice before the competition to allow for proper acclimatization and thermal conditioning.
Over the past month, the FHSAA has assembled a COVID-19 task force to hear proposals from coaches across the state. That group recommended deferring high school athletics for almost two weeks until Monday, August 10. No FHSAA member school would allow practices until that date. Under that plan, regular season athletic competition would have started on August 31, September 14, or September 21.
That task force’s three-phase plan to return to high school sports was denied with a unanimous vote of 16-0.
For several hours, a potential plan was discussed to delay the first official date for fall practice until August 10, so that the Board of Trustees can further investigate the recommendations outlined by SMAC. Board Member Mark Schusterman, Co-Athletic Director of Riviera Prep in Miami finally dropped that motion.
Instead, Wewahitchka’s soccer head coach Bobby Johns adopted a motion for the FHSAA to keep its calendar intact for a July 27 start date, allowing individual schools and districts to decide when their athletes could re-practice. FHSAA Executive Director George Tomyn also supported a start date of July 27 throughout the meeting.
Johns’s motion outlined three main points: 1) keeping the calendar together for the July 27 start date, 2) setting a date for individual schools to declare playing in the FHSAA state series, and 3) allowing a School schedules more regular seasonal games if you do not participate in the state series competition.
That motion was approved with a 10-5 vote.
Meanwhile, Board President Lauren Otero proposed a motion to adopt the SMAC Part II recommendation to have a uniform coronavirus questionnaire among FHSAA members. The Plant High Athletic Director’s motion failed with a 12-4 vote, the second time Otero was on the other side of the motion.
The newly elected Board President spoke bluntly about FHSAA leadership throughout the night, directly telling Tomyn that public school superintendents have sought FHSAA athletic guidance to no avail.
“There has been a lack of leadership in terms of FHSAA decision making in what I have heard from people,” he said.I ask for leadership from you and your staff. It has not been shown. We serve on this forum and have full-time jobs doing something else. Not to do the daily operations of the FHSAA. “
Even during its five-hour meeting, the FHSAA did not respond to a single question from the public, as the chat function in the Zoom lobby and YouTube broadcast were disabled. Members of the public were able to send questions to a designated email (which was established in the middle of the meeting), however, those questions were not addressed before the board voted on the motions presented.
The FHSAA allowed individual schools and school districts to make their own plans regarding a return to summer training and conditioning, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Many school districts allowed a restart on June 15; some private schools started as early as June 1.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently called the possible cancellation of high school sports for the fall semester “devastating” and advocated hope for a return to the grill in the fall.
“We have so many young children that this is their ticket to go to college through athletics, “said DeSantis.”We want to see opportunities for students, and we obviously want to see parents choosing so they can exercise that for distance learning if they want. But I think we just have to give as many opportunities for children as possible. “
As of Monday, Florida’s total number of coronavirus cases reached 360,000 cases, with 10,508 new cases reported on Sunday, according to the Florida Department of Health panel COVID-19. 5,072 Florida residents have died. Miami-Dade County has been hardest hit by the coronavirus, as the county reported 87,035 cases and 1,309 deaths, which led the state of Florida on Monday.
