Victoria Harkless
Assistant Editor-in-Chief
My apologies to any winter/spring sports athlete, but your sport should probably not be happening. While I did not feel comfortable writing about my opinion on sports last semester, as I was only mostly online, I feel comfortable doing it now that I am on campus full time. This is just my opinion not an attack on a particular sport team, player or coach.
While I understand not all sports should be stopped, there would still need to be some serious monitoring on the cleaning of shared equipment and ideally, if it does not allow for social distancing, there should be masks. For example; low contact sports like track can be done socially distanced and field equipment can be sanitized between uses. Sports like wrestling or basketball can not be distanced and can not be cleaned properly before each player touches it. Those sports can also not really be played with masks, because air constrictive masks could potentially lead to players having asthma attacks and other health problems.
Another reason sports should not be happening is the crowd sizes. You can limit the number of people allowed to go to games by giving students limited numbers of tickets, but when you have several schools at the same meet (or game) there is the risk that the stadium will not be able to fit all the guests, let alone distance them. There will also be people at the meets/games that wear their mask incorrectly or simply will not wear their mask at all, this is shown evident by people who do not wear masks correctly in the store or in other common places like parking lots, in line or outside a grocery store.
You may be saying well “Kick them out if they do not wear a mask,” but the simple answer to that, in my opinion is, you can not do that because it starts fights. We all have seen “Karens” refusing to wear masks for a variety of reasons. Personally, I would rather save another student from the potential embarrassment of being known as “Karen’s kid”. I also would like to save the district the embarrassment of having to deal with a parental meltdown.
I understand that sports mean a lot to a ton of people, but if they can not be done safely, they should not be done. They can not be safely done because of the inability to socially distance and clean properly. I also would like to save someone the potential embarrassment of having a parent freak out. Overall I think sports, currently, are a bad idea.
Image Credit: Valentin Balan on Unsplash
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