
The Minnesota State High School League, faced with the impossible task of navigating the 2020-21 sports calendar in a way that would make everyone happy, arrived at a decision Tuesday that seems like a reasonable compromise.
Football and Volleyball have been moved to start in March. Other scheduled fall sports seasons will continue as planned, but with limits.
Is it perfect? No, because no decision in a pandemic is perfect.
But I appreciate two things about it: 1) It has logic behind it. 2) It is a firm decision, which indicates a level of accountability missing in other recent decisions locally and nationally.
The safest choice from a pure COVID perspective would be to postpone all sports. From a mental health standpoint and from a handful of other perspectives that might not be the best choice.
So it comes down to risk management and deciding which sports have a better chance to have seasons in the safest way possible. Is there hard science saying soccer (which is starting) is safer than volleyball? Probably not a lot of double-blind studies, but there is at least the notion that outside is much safer than inside.
Advantage soccer.
Is there a way football — primarily an outdoor sport — could have been played safely? Maybe, but we haven't really tried it during a pandemic and some of the returns on early workouts at multiple levels haven't been encouraging. You take the potentially highest-risk sport and move it to spring, when hopefully our country will have a much better handle on coronavirus.