Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

Glen Farley (left) and I will return to the KP broadcast booth soon.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while looking out the window and thinking, "Gee, I should be getting ready to cover a football game ...":

** As stated above, I'm feeling a little forlorn today because under normal circumstances, I'd be a week away from calling my first high school football game of the year on local cable TV. Last year was my first as a play-by-play announcer, as it also was the first year as an analyst for my broadcast partner, former Brockton Enterprise football scribe Glen Farley, and we had an absolute blast bringing King Philip football to the viewers of North TV in Plainville. We were really looking forward to a second season to further hone our craft, and then the coronavirus struck.

We are now 27 weeks into the COVID-19 crisis, and our worst fears have been realized -- a fall season without high school football. It's been moved to a shortened "wedge" season during March and April, and I'm sure it will look a lot different than that to which we are all accustomed -- especially if we have one of those aggravating March blizzards that dumps 20 inches of snow on the football fields of the area.

But that's not all. Recently, the Hockomock League's schools voted to move girls' volleyball (a fall sport) to the wedge season over coronavirus fears. And several other leagues (the Mayflower League and South Coast Conference among them in our area) have just thrown in the towel altogether and moved ALL fall sports to that two-month window at the end of the winter.

Personally, I think that will be a disaster for the fall sports. Unless a school is fortunate enough to have artificial turf fields, the soccer and field hockey teams will be struggling to play on dormant fields that will be either frozen or muddy and easily damaged by increased foot traffic. Ditto for the golf teams, many of which may struggle to find golf courses that are actually open and playable.

King Philip football will be put off until early March.

COVID-19 has already taken a heavy toll on the 2020-21 season, even before it has started. There will be no MIAA tournaments this year and all of the seasons have been shortened. State-imposed alterations in the sports will also change the landscape; the urge to socially-distance the athletes on the playing field has resulted in rules changes that will make pandemic soccer almost unrecognizable as the sport the athletes have played all their lives. I understand the need for safety, but drastically altering the rules of the games will result in mass confusion on the field, and potentially harm the development of young athletes that may have the chance to compete in college or beyond.

I recently spoke to an athletic director about the effort to implement all of the changes forced upon his school by COVID-19, and there was an unmistakable tone of frustration in his responses. One sticking point has been the Hockomock League's refusal to implement the one-year suspension of the MIAA's out-of-season coaching restrictions. Suspending the rule seemed to be a good idea in the wake of the lost spring season of 2019-20, allowing coaches to keep close contact with athletes that had been denied practice and competition, and therefore maintain some sort of normalcy. But as the AD told me, many coaches are hired for only the season in which they are actively coaching. It would be unfair to ask them to "coach" for no compensation out-of-season, or to ask the schools to provide additional compensation that may not have been budgeted. Liability issues are also raised if the coaches aren't compensated.

Amid all this, I wish there was more data on the sports that were conducted independently during the springtime. A number of high school-age baseball leagues sprouted during the summer to replace the lost spring season and the canceled American Legion programs, and I would really like to know if there were any COVID-19 hot spots among them. That could have gone a long way toward determining if there was a realistic risk to stage fall sports, but I imagine no one kept any data on that.

So we sit and wait and hope against hope that the leagues that decide to keep fall sports on the field get through the season without incident, and then that basketball, hockey and the winter sports can endure as well. In the meantime, I'm practicing -- not for any athletic pursuit, of course, but I'm practicing at speaking clearly through a mask and into a microphone.

** Of course, that's assuming that media will be allowed in any sporting events this year. The AD to whom I spoke said that as far as he knew, media had to be figured into the limitation of 50 spectators at any game.

I, of course, think that is ridiculous. There are some games in the so-called "major" sports where as many as 20 media members might show up from local cable TV and radio and newspapers, lessening the number of parents and fans that can attend.

The media should be independent of those numbers; we were determined to be "essential workers" during the height of the pandemic and we willingly accept the risk. But more importantly, with restrictions almost certain to be imposed upon attendance, never before has it been so important to allow the media to bring the coverage of these games to the parents and fans that may be denied the privilege of watching them in person.

** On the topic of high school sports, I spent some time perusing the list of proposed changes to the MIAA Rulebook that will be voted upon sometime next year. Each year, the association solicits rule-change proposals from its members and the public at large, and the individual sport committees review and recommend prior to the final vote.

Among the more interesting proposals are those calling for the banning of male athletes from girls' field hockey or the establishment of boys' field hockey. The premise is that boys are too big and strong to play on the same teams as girls. I might agree, but I can also imagine what the response would be if girls were being told they can't play on a team because they're perceived to be weaker than boys. All hell would ensue.

I don't see a great demand for boys' field hockey out here in the sticks. But as it is a very popular sport in some parts of the world, maybe it would get some traction in more diverse communities closer to Boston or other metropolitan areas.

The same battle is being fought in volleyball, where schools that don't offer the sport to boys have to allow them to compete on the girls' teams. One possible solution is to raise the height of the net. No wonder why athletic directors get frustrated!

One proposal to the MIAA is to make
pickleball an official high school sport.

But the corker of them all was a proposal from a charter school that the "sport" of pickleball be made an official MIAA sport.

Pickleball?

According to the sources I found, pickleball incorporates elements of tennis, badminton and table tennis into its rules. It's played on a badminton court and as many as four players can compete, holding oversized wooden paddles to smack a rubbery wiffle ball over a net. It looks like something that should be played at a rest home or on the beach because the level of athleticism involved is minimal at best.

At the risk of getting multiple letters and emails of complaints from the pickleball lobby, let's get real. I'd rather see the MIAA sanction curling as an interscholastic sport; at least the skills of using those brooms will come in handy later in life when it's time to sweep the garage.

Pickleball.

** I had more to share today, but the column is getting long and I have things to do. Good news -- I have recovered most of the data from the damaged hard drive of my former desktop computer. Bad news -- the knee is still super sore and my lawn really needs mowing.

I think those are first-world problems. 

Stay safe, everyone, and keep an eye out for my next episode of "The Owner's Box After Dark," coming soon. I'm really liking the production values!