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While hurdles remain, the genuine prospect of a high school basketball season is perhaps more in sight than ever before.
One probably didn’t need to remind St. Charles North junior Emma Ludwig.
Ludwig, one of the DuKane Conference’s top guards as a freshman two years ago, tore her right ACL before her sophomore season.
Now fully healthy and playing without a brace in AAU action during the summer, if the season began tomorrow, Ludwig would be ready.
“I’d be out there all 36 minutes,” Ludwig said. “As long as I could.”
In a stunning move Friday, Illinois governmental and public health leaders announced that regions who are within Phase 4 of the state’s coronavirus mitigation plan can conduct intra-conference matches with high-risk sports, which includes basketball and football.
A more detailed outlook of the prep sports landscape, by tier, can be viewed here. The IHSA is expected to formalize dates for the remainder of the sports calendar at its board meeting on Jan. 27.
Initial reaction from St. Charles North girls basketball coach Mike Tomczak is “cautiously optimistic.”
“I think as quickly we’ve seen it’s able to change one way, it can certainly change the other way,” Tomczak said. “As of today, right this minute at 5:01 p.m. on Friday, we’re feeling good.”
“...Knowing where the goalposts are now, for the first time with regards to basketball, is a huge thing,” Tomczak continued. “Just being able to look at a number and look at a metric and say “You know what? When we get here, we can play again’ it’s really difficult to describe that kind of feeling.”
Ludwig said Tomczak organized a team leader Zoom earlier in the day.
“He was telling us we actually, now more than ever, have a high chance to play. I was very thrilled to hear that because the girls and I, we’ve been putting a lot of work in since September,” Ludwig said. “Just patiently waiting to see what the Governor and IHSA has to say.”
“I think a lot of teams, if we do play this year, are going to be very surprised at how our team is super strong and how far we’ve come since last year, myself included,” Ludwig continued.
Kane County, which is in Region 8 in the state’s mitigation plan, currently remains in Tier 2 mitigations. For high-risk sports, that only allows non-contact practices.
“I know there’s still some hurdles as far as [COVID-19 metrics] we’ve got to hit, good spots, but it sure does look like a good spot,” Batavia girls basketball coach Kevin Jensen said. “I don’t think it’s guaranteeing us anything yet, but it opened the door that seemed like it was going to be slammed shut in our face.”
Friday’s news inches the state closer to perhaps resolving a tumultuous chapter in which the IHSA, Gov. JB Pritzker’s office and the Illinois Department of Public Health have seesawed back and forth on the resumption of sports.
In November the IHSA initially defied Pritzker’s initial pause on high school sports as COVID-19 cases surged, leaving individual school districts to make decisions on whether to play before retreating a few weeks later.
While questions remain for school districts and its members on allowances to play, schedule building, referee availability and more, at least for now, hope for some form of a season seems a bit more realistic than weeks past.
“I’ve maintained that hope throughout the whole time specifically for our seniors, who have worked, some of them their whole careers just looking forward to play varsity basketball at St. Charles East,” Saints varsity boys basketball coach Pat Woods said. “Put on the uniform; that was my original hope for them, that they got to have something of that experience.”