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The Invisible Game Changer


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Covid-19 has come, but not yet gone. It has ravaged, killed, and changed the way every one of us lives. On topic, it has cancelled entire seasons, games, and destroyed hopes and dreams. 18 months after the onslaught began, and in Indiana the 1st "strike" generally began at the Lawrence Central basketball sectional, where 6 or more administrators and coaches ended up losing their lives fairly quickly. 

But where do we stand today?  We have a new strain, we have games being cancelled every week (although not nearly as many), and we really don't yet see the light at the end of the tunnel.

My question is this...... how many games have been altered by student athletes being put in quarantine and unable to play?  How many surprise upsets may have been influenced by this? Very few?  Perhaps. But, I know of 2 local Indy area metro schools that played recent games with double-digit players sitting out because of quarantine. And the majority of them were starters. One was a 4A highly ranked, the other a 6A from one of those mega-conferences.

I don't think the outcome was changed because of these quarantines, in fact I'm sure it wasn't. And, I only had information from one of the combatants. Who's to say how many were missing from the other team?  Schools don't make this information public, probably because they can't. So until it gets bad enough to cancel, you would never know (unless you have inside information).

I would put this out there..... it's very likely EVERY game is influenced by covid, a player, a coach, someone on each team has or is being quarantined, or has missed practices. I'm not here to restart the argument for vaxing, but this will  still be with us for the 2022 season unless we get to that magic number described as herd immunity. There will be more surprises on the football field. The question is how many were caused by surprises off the football field?

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I've had coaches tell me that this year has been even more difficult because last year the protocols were ramped up so high. This year, it's more difficult to tell who has it, who has been vaccinated, etc. I can only imagine what coaching staffs and athletic departments are going through. One coach told me, we're just hoping to get to tomorrow to play on Friday.

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WE have lost three games this year so far due to not having enough kids.  When we had 17 kids at practice one day. Our situation was due to not only actual Covid cases, but also the contact tracing that was occurring from the kids sitting in the classroom.  It has been a struggle but the good news is our kids are still working hard in practice and we are getting back on track hopefully.  It sucks, because we are treading on the lines of wish we could tell the kids to do blank, and that is not our place to tell kids and parents to do blank

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