Good morning all.
Welcome to the end of the regular season. The greatest time of the year goes by way too quickly.
You're probably wondering...what's the deal with my subject line? Well here we go.
I'm posting this on this board since by far, the Class 4 Board has way more visibility and discussion than the other boards. And as a Class 4 guy, that makes me happy.
And I will say that what I'm going to mention does not affect my school or my district. Well remotely it does...I guess you can say indirectly as we live in the era of the power points system. So I'm mostly relieved about that.
But as head into the final week of the regular season, I can't help but feel heartbroken for the schools who canceled their seasons outright, canceled their seasons part of the way through, or just recently canceled their seasons. I'm not going to get into the reasons as to why schools canceled at least a part of their seasons. That's not the reason of this post. However, it's disheartening.
I feel bad for these schools and the opponents of those schools...especially over the last few weeks of the regular season. Schools that don't have time to find an opponent. Schools that don't have an opportunity to provide a true Senior Night experience for their kids...and that includes the band, cheerleaders, and others who deserve recognition. I also feel bad for these schools due to the gate(s) that they lose out on which go a long way in helping support other athletic programs within those schools. This causes these athletic departments to scramble to find those funds they were counting on from their gates and concessions. I don't know officially, but I would not be shocked if there were schools that lost multiple home games for whatever reason. That's painful.
This is why I think the VHSL (yes, I know...people are like, he's whining about the VHSL again), should once again step up (that's asking much I know) and state that they must be informed by the March before the upcoming season if schools are going to field a team or not. This will allow them to compile a list of schools that will not be fielding teams for that upcoming Fall so that affected schools can have a little bit of time to find replacement opponents. It's not like these schools do not know their enrollment numbers already and; therefore, know the potential pool of athletes that they can pull from. They should know if they are going to be able to adequately field a team or not.
A line has to be drawn in the sand here and action must be taken. There's no shame in saying, "you know what..we're only going to have 13 kids this Fall...we're not going to field a team". I'd rather know that earlier than right before the season. Kind of like a bad relationship. I'd rather have it end early, then end later after having time and effort invested in it.
By the way, I think this should apply to all sports. For Fall sports, you can have a March 1 drop dead date. For Winter sports, you can have an August 1 drop dead date. And for Spring sports, you can have a November 1 drop dead date. Those are just examples of what you can do.
So that's me on my soap box this morning. We know that sports participation is down. But these forfeits and cancelations are becoming way too common. And it's sickening and disappointing to see.
Here's a chance for the VHSL to step in and do something right and show leadership to help ease the pain of any schools which may be negatively affected.
