There will be high school sports in Sacramento. But the word for now is patience
The talking points in society offer a full menu for debate: race, religion, politics, education and sports.
I took the sporting route for a media career without losing the pulse for the others.
Growing up on a farm in Half Moon Bay in the 1970s, I was in tune with the newspaper, magazine and television coverage of Richard Nixon’s Watergate, the antiwar movement and women’s rights. We talked about it at the dinner table. We watched Walter Cronkite on the tube, back when there were still tubes.
My mother Gail and stepmother Fran led different households but were united in many beliefs. They were the brightest, most admired people in any room. Mom once met aspiring senator John F. Kennedy in New York while working as a personal assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt. Fran met aspiring president Robert F. Kennedy while serving in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. Both mothers encouraged us kids to have an ear and eye on current events.
I gained my work ethic from them, and also from my father John, who went from filmmaker to medical student in his mid 40s and enjoyed his second career as a psychiatrist. And my stepfather Bob Gray, who slugged across the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944 amid a hail of enemy fire. He much preferred covering ground on horseback as a rancher. Both fathers urged me to find a calling and to never let up.
Growing up, I especially admired the high school achievers in newspaper coverage over Nixon denials and bombast. The coverage included my older sister Kate with award-winning art projects at Half Moon Bay High, or her twin Thad, who could cover 2 miles on a treacherous trail in just over 9 minutes for a nationally ranked cross-country program. Thad then gleefully made me leg out what had to be 3 miles to retrieve a wayward ball in cow pastures.
I spent my high school years in the Eastern Oregon mountains of Wallowa County, where we were Savages at Enterprise High (mascot since chanced to Outlaws). I played football and ran track because I enjoyed competition and my teammates. I couldn’t get enough, so I wrote stories for the weekly Wallowa County Chieftain paper on all prep sports because I felt connected and honored.
I’m still hooked. I got my daily newspaper start in 1984 at the Davis Enterprise, where it was a thrill to watch national recruit tailback Marc Hicks ravage defenses for the Davis Blue Devils, and there were the Jim Sochor-coached UC Davis Aggies. I started at The Sacramento Bee in the summer of 1988, a sports freelancer at first, then a full-timer.
I hear the call for sports
I still embrace the joy and responsibility of chronicling the efforts of kids and what it means to their campuses and their communities.
That’s why I hear what people are saying or writing on social media through signed online petitions of 12,000 and growing about the return to school this fall amid this pandemic and coronavirus concerns. Schools will reopen, but what about prep sports or youth sports? College sports seem to be on track, including California community college programs who voted last week to have seasons this coming academic year, but no one is charging into any of this full steam. Baby steps are needed before walking or sprinting.
I hear and feel the concerns: How can thousands rightfully and pridefully protest in honor of George Floyd on the Golden Gate Bridge, in Los Angeles and throughout Sacramento while kids are largely still not allowed to work out with teammates in the weight room or on the grass?
How can restaurants, malls and other places that draw large crowds continue after green-lighting phases of reopening from Gov. Gavin Newsom, but high school or youth sports not resume participation? The virus especially harms those with preexisting conditions, especially the elderly.
Sports will return this fall
I believe sports will return on high school campuses this fall because they have to. If kids are on a school campus, then so should sports teams. Sports are a crucial part of learning, growing and living.
But if there is an alarming spike of coronavirus cases, then we can be thrust right back into where we were in March with school closures and suspended sports seasons. We don’t know what will happen. It’s difficult to even project.
I do know from my experiences that people in education champion the benefits of engagement and experiences. I have not met anyone in education — teacher, coach, administrator, superintendent — who believes in reducing, suspending or eliminating sports. That would be counter to their beliefs.
Members of the Sacramento County task force working on recommendation plans to reopen schools are in constant contact. A crew of area superintendents will meet Thursday to discuss some more. The governing bodies for prep sports — the CIF — are formulating ideas, though the CIF and its 10 sections do not and will not suggest when schools open. That’s up to each school district.
Superintendents such as Chris Hoffman of the Elk Grove Unified and Chris Evans of Natomas Unified don’t want to cease or suspend sports. Like their peers in any district across the state, they want to be careful in this reopening phase because these are their kids, too. The responsibility is on their shoulders, not mine or yours.
Hoffman made the early call to close Elk Grove schools and suspend sporting events when the pandemic hit in March. He took heat for it, but he was right. Hoffman is a product of high school sports in Sacramento County, and those experiences led him into coaching and educational administration. Same with Evans. This is what they do.
Some of the very best administrators and coaches are those who played high school sports. Same with people in society. Sports taught a lot about accountability, about teamwork, about winning and losing. What lessons would there be if there are no high school sports? We can’t embrace that thinking.
“High school sports are not over,” Evans said this week. “We’re meeting to do what we can to make it all work.”
Keeping watch and biggest fears
In education, everyone keeps tabs on what their outlining districts are doing, of their reopening plans. Everyone sees the updates of Bay Area schools returning to campus for football summer drills. Or in Hilmar, Yuba City, Wheatland or East Nicolaus. And we all see the news of how Alabama football had six positive cases of coronavirus last week, or how a number of positive cases popped up at Boise State.
The fear is a virus outbreak on a campus or on a team, and then what?
No one was prepared for any of this. How could we be? Evans said he only really heard of “pandemic” from a distance before it consumed his life starting in March. Social distancing for teenagers — dances, sports, rooting sections, rallies, quad at lunch — seems to go against the very nature of being social creatures.
Distance learning? Before this spring, I thought that’s what we had in Oregon for high school, where twin sister Margo and I lived 46 miles out of town.
Here’s the word we all have to embrace now: patience. The race back to high school campus normalcy isn’t about who’s first, it’s about what’s right at the right time.
This story was originally published June 10, 2020 at 7:10 AM.