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| At far right, Glen Farley and this blog's author are calling the game action. |
Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while counting the minutes before a real orthopedic surgeon looks at my damaged left knee:
** The photo you see above is somewhat nostalgic in the context of the times. It's the press box at the Arnold Macktaz Field at King Philip Regional High School in Wrentham, and those two robust gentlemen standing at the far right end of the box are the North Attleboro Community Television (North TV) telecasting team for KP football, Glen Farley and yours truly.
I post that photo hoping that Glen and I can renew our roles in about 2 1/2 months, but as I type this, I have no idea if there will be high school football in Massachusetts this fall -- let alone whether I can make a reasonably understandable call of a game while wearing a mask.
Earlier this week, I learned that at least one Massachusetts high school has already canceled its upcoming football season -- Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden. As far as I know, that's the only one. I've chatted with a few athletic directors in our corner of the universe and they are still planning for a resumption of high school sports as scheduled in late August, although they admit that they're awaiting directions from their individual school systems once it's determined how (or if) in-school schooling will take place.
All this comes at a time when some of the professional leagues are trying to rekindle themselves. The NBA will play a truncated playoff tournament with all the teams converging upon one city (Orlando, which just happens to be in the middle of a state surging in coronavirus cases). The NHL has similar plans in the works. Major League Baseball has finally approved a 60-game regular season starting at the end of July. And the NFL? As far as anyone knows, it may be business as usual -- although reductions in stadium capacity aren't being ruled out, as well as a few other accommodations being made to the rugged and uncooperative COVID-19 virus.
It is disheartening to see the huge leaps in coronavirus infections in the Southern states (and California) that chose to buy into Donald Trump's nonsense and reopened too soon. It's equally disappointing to hear from all of the undereducated conspiracy theorists that claim that wearing a facemask is a violation of their fundamental rights as Americans. If they truly feel that way, then I hope they feel free to take as many deep breaths as they can at one of the Nitwit-in-Chief's campaign rallies.
The only thing that may save then from a horrible disease is the fact that at the last of those rallies, there were two times as many empty seats than there were gullible and toothless MAGA sycophants in attendance.
Yeah, I'm generalizing. So sue me. I despise Donald Trump and everything he represents. You know that. And right now, he represents a cavalier disregard for anything that doesn't benefit him personally. We've lost more than 120,000 Americans to this disease and it's not gone yet, but does he give a shit? Not in the slightest.
I've gone astray from sports a bit here, but it all ties in. Here in Massachusetts, the COVID-19 curve has been flattened because we still actively wear the masks and endure other minor hardships so we can put this mess behind us eventually. That, in fact, is my hope for a high school sports season starting with King Philip's second game of the year (Jared Ware and Del Malloy would probably be calling the opener against North Attleboro) -- that the curve will be flat enough to allow a football season to take place.
Hey, if I have to, I'll wait. There will be plenty of basketball games for me to do at KP, Mansfield and Foxboro in the months that will follow. And if that means more people will be healthy and happy in our towns, I'm all for it. But I'd surely hate to see another high school season shelved as this past spring season was.
** As I mentioned in a previous post, there will be some changes in the upcoming high school sports season regardless of whether there's a COVID-19 interruption. One of them is the decision by the MIAA's Tournament Management Committee to shelve the use of MaxPreps for seeding the end-of-season tournaments for another year.
MaxPreps is a national clearinghouse for high school sports information that also has a proprietary and secretive system for ranking teams, and that system was going to be used for seeding all of the MIAA's tournaments starting this year -- replacing a simpler system where a team's record was the basis for where it was seeded in the tournament pairings.
The biggest complaints about the plan involved the annoying tendency of MaxPreps' schedules and results to be incomplete or incorrect, as well as the organization's unwillingness to explain its algorithms to those that wanted to understand why it ranked some teams ahead of others.
Over the course of my podcast, "The Owner's Box" (25 episodes entering a brief injury-related hiatus), several of my guests spoke about their concerns over MaxPreps' involvement in the MIAA Tournaments. What I think I'll do once I can sit in one place for more than 10 minutes at a time is edit some parts of those interviews together into a 26th episode that underscores the concerns that led the TMC to slam on the brakes -- at least temporarily -- on MaxPreps.
Then after my July vacation, maybe I'll be able to corral a few of those individuals for an update and ask them what they think the eventual outcome will be.
** As hinted above, I'm seeing a surgeon on Thursday morning to start the steps toward fixing my battered left knee. I read the explanation of the damage the MRI found, and it almost made me gag. But I'm no doctor and I don't play one on TV, so I'll leave the next steps to the professionals.
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| Flo makes the save, but why? |
I know that's how things went in Attleboro. It was always the newspaper's fault, whether it really was or not.
These things bother me. And they really shouldn't.
Stay safe, everyone. Wear the masks.
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