Pedelty Box: High school sports are running out of squares on the calendar

Time has run out on the IHSA’s four-season blueprint

I think we all have those moments where we know something, but we don’t really know it — fully accepted, fully integrated, not just a vague understanding in the back of our minds — until something flicks that switch for us.

In regards to the “we-still-plan-to-give-every-sport-a-season” plan the Illinois High School Association has been clinging to, that moment came for me when I took the 2020 calendar off the side of the fridge the other day and replaced it with its 2021 successor.

“They can’t do it,” I muttered to myself as I stood there. “We’re running out of squares on the calendar.”

It took that to really get it through my head that unless something completely out of left field (or the left wing, left hashmark, left starting block or left side of the net, depending on your sport) happens, the IHSA’s hopes of playing its entire slate of sports in any meaningful way — now that we are sitting here on January 4, 2021 — is at best an incredible long shot.

There are 365 days in your typical year (2020 was atypical, but that’s not news, is it?). It is Jan. 4 now. The extended-out IHSA calendar that in the minds of some already extended a bit too far into the summer, is currently scheduled to go until June 26 — 173 days from now. Subtract the 24 Sundays between now and then, and you’re at 149 days.

That leaves roughly 50 days each for the IHSA’s remaining seasons if practices for winter sports such as bowling, girls basketball and boys basketball were allowed to resume practices today ... which they most definitely are not. And for every couple weeks that goes by without a return to sports, take four days off each season’s calendar.

So, as a hypothetical:

Let’s say the IHSA gets the meeting it’s been asking for with the Illinois Department of Public Health/Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office a week from today — a meeting the state feels would be a waste of time until its current stance that high school sports should equivocally be on pause changes — and, sitting around the virtual table, they agree basketball and bowling can begin with, say, masks and no spectators as early as the following Monday.

Allow two weeks for practice before competition can begin, and that would leave us with some two weeks of contests before the currently scheduled Feb. 13 end of the winter season ... or, presuming they split the remaining time on the calendar between the three remaining seasons as I spelled out a few paragraphs ago, you might get four or five weeks of competition before we flip to the new spring calendar which includes football, volleyball and boys soccer.

A season, my friends, that is not. It’s barely a month — and that’s if the IDPH agrees to meet with the IHSA a week from today, which itself seems like a long shot.

They can’t do it. We’re running out of squares on the calendar.

The good news? There are vaccines filtering into our communities. There have been some templates of sports working, for the most part, at other levels and in other states. Most of the schools I know which took extra-long winter breaks or were forced to all-remote learning are planning returns to the classroom in the coming days and weeks.

And there are options to restructure the remaining calendar — options I’d bet my San Diego Chargers Super Bowl XXIX Champions pin the IHSA has been discussing, the most likely of which (in my eyes) is cutting it to a two-season slate from here on out and, unfortunately, forcing student-athletes to make those “volleyball, soccer or softball?” and “football, soccer or baseball?” choices we were all trying to avoid.

I appreciate the IHSA’s having had a plan this entire time; a blueprint of how things could work if the state government and the COVID-19 pandemic allowed. It was the right way to approach it, the way I would have approached it, and the four-season calendar that allowed every sport a season without too much crossover was a plan that could have worked had it been given the chance.

But ultimately, for right or for wrong, that chance never came.

So what’s the plan now?

We’re running out of squares on the calendar.