It's official: Outdoor sports can return after county clears case-rate threshold
Mar. 3—Less than 24 hours after returning to practice, the path back to game action has gotten even clearer for several Kern County student-athletes.
Following a recent announcement by the state that outdoor sports could continue in counties where positive COVID-19 cases came in at a rate at or below 14 per 100,000 residents, Kern County officially reached that threshold Tuesday, with the county announcing that it currently comes it at a 13.3 per 100,000 residents clip. That number ensures that high school competition will in fact move forward locally, provided numbers don't spike in the coming weeks.
"Once the kids started getting gear and started getting out there, they felt like, 'OK, man, this thing is really going to happen,'" said Liberty football coach Bryan Nixon, whose team held its first practice Monday. "This just made it more of a reality."
Though several sports will be conducted at a much later time of year than is typical, coaches say it mostly felt like business as usual as workouts commenced.
"It seemed like normal," Ridgeview cross country coach Ryan Lucker said, whose team would generally compete in the fall. "Kids seemed like the same kids I remember from a year ago. It didn't seem like anything new."
Though Monday may have felt like a regular first practice, Lucker acknowledged that things will, in fact, be quite different this year, and not simply because of the delayed start time.
To decrease the chances of spreading coronavirus amongst athletes, the Kern High School District is putting caps on rosters in many sports. Saying he normally has over 100 athletes at his disposal, Lucker and all other cross country coaches can have just 12 boys and 12 girls on a team this year.
"If you have a limited roster size, you have to tell kids no," Lucker said. "So that will bring the excitement down, make it diminish a little bit."
The Wolf Pack's season will also be very short, as they have just two races — one against Bakersfield High and Frontier at Frontier on March 13 and a home race against Centennial and Stockdale on March 20 — on the schedule.
But those downsides aren't enough to dampen Lucker's enthusiasm for the season.
"It's way beneficial," he said. "Those kids who show up, they're working for something. These kids need socialization, they need that sense of normalcy. They're working to better themselves in some way. And that's what we want to see. It doesn't matter who it is. We want them out there and we want them to get better."
Nixon, whose team opens the season at home against Ridgeview on March 26, echoed those sentiments, saying an immediate excitement has built up around his players after months of brutal isolation.
"It's really good that I don't have to tell the kids I miss them on Zoom. I get to see them in person now," Nixon said. "We know there's some hurdles that still need to be cleared to get to the finish line. But today was a major hurdle."
The Kern High School District, which approved a plan to allow a gradual return of sports during a board of trustees meeting Monday, acknowledge the hurdles in front of them. And though he's confident they can be cleared, School Support Services Director Stan Greene says a lot of work remains in the coming weeks.
"There's just a lot, a lot of questions and no answers," Greene said at Monday's meeting. "Some of them are the COVID testing of the football players ... there's been no guidance generally across the board where you're supposed to secure those tests, what it's supposed to look like, what happens when a kid tests positive, what happens when it's a false positive, what happens to a kid that has previously had COVID. Just a lot of questions."
