Phase 5: In #UnMasking Illinois, Youth Sports Can Lead The Way
Signs of defiance encouraging trend but needed on mass scale to ward off looming public health regulations
(Photo Credit: Freeport Journal-Standard)
Good morning and thanks for spending a portion of your day with The Kerr Report.
Happy Phase 5 everyone!
I was talking to a friend over a beer the other night.
We talked a little about history, how after seismic events, things tend to drift back towards the middle.
The middle being normal. That’s probably a road where economic stability and behavioral empathy meets.
Covid is one of those seismic events that has drifted us away from the middle. How will we make it back?
Sports, youth sports in particular, can lead the way.
I am a youth sports coach. Have been one almost 20 years, when I first worked with RBI Baseball in Chicago. It’s the most fun I’ve had volunteering; the perfect blend of philanthropy and mentorship.
For the last five years, I’ve served as coach and advisory board member in the Jr. Scouts youth tackle football program in Lake Forest, IL. We did not have a fall 2020 season (Covid) and in March, we were dead in the water for a spring season.
Our league, The Chicagoland Youth Football League, cancelled tentative plans to have a spring league. Couldn’t get field space, they said. Too many concerns over disjointed public health policies in the various towns and communities that make up the league.
We understood and accepted their decision. But the obstacle became our way forward.
After a few phone calls late one night, we found a few partners with the same determination to create something out of scratch. Sure, they could put a team together, they had a group of eighth graders that deserved a final junior season before high school.
Like us, what they needed was someone to play. And for an authority figure to say yes, you can use our field. We quickly found just that figure.
When everyone else was telling us no, we can’t, citing fear-based concerns over health and safety in justifying locking the gates to facilities all over Chicagoland, one school leader said, ‘nah, we don’t care what everyone else is doing. We’re not going to call our district attorney and ask permission first. We’ll leave them out of it. Instead, we’re going to do what is right for the overall physical and mental health of kids.’
Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook invited us to use their football field. Then everything else fell into place.
We made the schedule, adopted the rules, found the officials and created our own league. The bootstrap environment, the novelty of it all, was part of the appeal.
For five weeks in April and May, we played games on Sundays. Hundreds of boys (and a few girls) from north Chicagoland got to participate in tackle football, a game that rewards those that value effort, grit and perseverance.
It wasn’t smooth sailing. We had our share of Covid-related challenges. But we dealt with them sensibly and because those involved did not have competing agendas, putting the experience of participants first, we worked through challenges and finished our season with every game but one played.
All those involved walked away with a renewed sense of accomplishment and belief in the power of how independent-minded leadership can move mountains.
Stephen Covey, writer of one of the most famous and best-selling business books of all-time, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” said this about action absent obstruction:
Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance
I think what Covey is saying is how there’s clarity in purpose. When that purpose is unwavering in the direction of freedom and liberty—rejecting oppressive abolition—the energy force created can be unstoppable.
Youth sports can be, already is in many places, the generator of that energy force.
Phase 5 is here. The only real change from before is the removal of capacity limitations. Yet recommended restrictions remain as it pertains to other public heath policy.
Graduation season is just about over and we are two and a half months away from the start of the 2021-22 school year. There are three critical issues facing all school districts over the next 10 weeks as it relates to Covid before the doors open again in mid-to-late August:
Mask mandates
Vaccination status
Testing regimens
As I wrote earlier in the week, schools for the most part are punting on masking until July, waiting on updated guidance from the Illinois Department of Public Health and Illinois State Board of Education, the official education calendar flipping over July 1. A mask mandate remains in place for the summer.
There are school district boards, like Warren Township 121 (Gurnee), not waiting on state agencies to act. But rather than lean away from Covid-related regulation, they are leaning in, making in-person learning a condition of vaccination status.
The state is pushing the saliva-based Shield testing program on schools, expanding its reach this week to include elementary schools. As for testing procedures for the opening of the school year, an ominous comment this week from IDPH Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike:
As we move ever closer to returning to how we lived pre-pandemic, it is critically important that we identify cases of COVID-19 as quickly as possible to help prevent outbreaks, which could ultimately lead to new surges. Offering testing in schools, along with vaccination and masking, can help protect students, staff and teachers when in-person learning resumes.
Illinois’ ties to Shield, developed at the state university in Champaign University, can be read in marketing communication with customers. They, the manufacturers of Shield, are attaching amended quarantines to purchase of Covid tests:
This is not good public health policy. It’s coercive extortion.
While we are weeks and months away from the start of the school year, early signs point to masks returning, along with continued vaccination and testing programs plastered all over schools and in email messages.
School boards will take up the issue in July but does anyone really believe that a district BOE will step out and vote against ISBE and IDPH guidance? It hasn’t happened yet, at least in Chicagoland. Expect more parental and student-led protests this summer, even as soon as later this month, similar to the #ReturnToLearn and #ReturnToPlay gatherings we saw last fall.
This all leads back to my original thesis at the top of this article about youth sports. It’s largely symbolic but matters considering the current climate.
When our tackle football season began in April, we bought a boxful of masks specially fitted for helmets.
Immediately, our players complained about not being able to see and how they never fit right on the face masks.
After the first game, we ditched them. Everyone else did the same. No school administrator barking at us to “follow the guidance.” Common sense prevailed.
This approach—sound judgement over tyrannical edicts—should be the rule of law this summer.
A level-headed approach is backed by data. There remains zero-to-minuscule record of virus transmission through sports. The Illinois High School Association, in its own winter sports survey of over 1,400 schools, found 3% of athlete positives traced to a sports competition or practice. “Traced” is a key word as there is no linkage to transmission through the act of playing football or basketball or volleyball or any sport. Any spread likely came via the locker room, car pool, or PlayStation parties.
(The survey, completed months ago, has been buried in political laundry. Matt Troha, the organization’s communications director told me in an interview that it was waiting to officially release the results as “the IHSA didn’t want folks to feel like they are trying to mislead them to make a positive point on our behalf.” So positive news on Covid is ‘misleading?’ That’s what we are dealing with in Illinois.)
Hopeful trend—we are seeing an uptick in rule defiance this spring, not just in my youth football league, but all over. Lacrosse games considered “high-risk” thus mask requirement? No mask in sight. Referees aren’t wearing them.
Track athletes? Masks buried in their gym bags. Baseball? Softball? Fields littered with unused PPE.
I could make this a public vs. private argument as the private sector has led the way in defiance of foolish guidelines, free from the shackles of bureaucracy.
But I don’t want to do that here. Regardless of the sector, masks must go, as do the strong-arm vaccination and testing campaigns.
So keep the masks off this summer. Do so loudly and defiantly.
Remember the #HearOurVoiceIllinois movement earlier this year? It worked. Sports came back.
Up next? #UnMaskIllinois.
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