Season on the Brink: "The Hardest Part is The Waiting and the Hoping"

A positive COVID-19 test finds one Chicagoland sports team fighting to save its season

Monday, members of the Lake Forest High School field hockey team received a group Remind message from its coach, Catherine Catanzaro.

They were instructed to go to Competition Gymnasium, site of the school’s COVID-19 testing center.

Awaiting them in the gymnasium were LFHS Principal Dr. Chala Holland, the school’s Director of Safety and Security Lane Linder and Athletic Director Tim Burkhalter. Once gathered, Burkhalter delivered devastating news.

A Scouts field hockey athlete had tested positive for COVID-19, Burkhalter said. As a result, the program would be shut down for 14 days. The athletes would have to leave the building and quarantine at home.

“It was the most heartbreaking thing. They were sobbing, they were sick. It was as if someone had ripped out part of their (insides),” Catanzaro said. “They are such good kids and have worked so hard. To watch the realization that it might not happen was really tough.”

The ‘it’ Catanzaro refers to is the remaining portion of the Scouts 2021 spring season.

On April 7, the team was scheduled to play New Trier High School. The Trevians are the Scouts long time rival and in 2019, the last time a full season of field hockey was played in the state of Illinois, New Trier defeated Lake Forest in double overtime to win the state championship.

The Illinois Field Hockey Association, the governing body that runs high school field hockey, is not sponsoring a state tournament this spring. The April 7 date with New Trier represented an unofficial state championship game for Lake Forest.

After a positive test in the program, the New Trier game, Senior Day, the rest of their season, were all in jeopardy of taking place.

To add to players’ anguish—Monday marked the the third time in the last six months the program has been ordered to quarantine due to players testing positive for COVID-19

Catanzaro, the Scouts coach since 2017, has become an unsought authority figure on the subject of program shut downs due to Covid.

“Not something I want on my resume,” she said.

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Here’s how this one went down.

Lake Forest began its field hockey season in early March.

The week of spring break, March 22, the team held optional practices for athletes that stayed around town. But most of the team traveled.

Regular practices resumed March 29. The team won season-opening matches against Loyola Academy (April 1) and Frances Parker (April 3).

Monday was the first day Lake Forest High School District 115 instituted five-day-a-week full-day in-person learning during the 2020-21 school year. For students opting in, they are required the week of April 5 to undergo a regimen that includes twice-weekly COVID-19 surveillance testing.

(Since early 2021, all in-season athletes participating in medium-risk or high-risk sports have been required by the district to take weekly rapid antigen surveillance testing. Field hockey is labeled higher risk by the Illinois Department of Public Health.)

It was during the day Monday when a Lake Forest field hockey player took her mandated COVID-19 test and the result came back positive.

The player traveled out of town for spring break and did not show any symptoms upon returning, according to Catanzaro. In fact, she was asymptomatic when she took the Monday test (every other field hockey player who took the antigen test Monday tested negative).

But because the one athlete who tested positive played and practiced with the team for at least four days before her test (Catanzaro said the player returned to practice March 30 or March 31) it triggered the district to institute a 14-day quarantine until the case can be reviewed by the Lake County Health Department.

In October 2020, during fall contact days, a positive test on the team led to a 14-day quarantine. In March, the same scenario occurred after a positive test. In the March case, the player who tested positive after a rapid antigen test took a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test the day after, which came back negative. Several other Scouts field hockey players took PCR tests soon after the one positive antigen test. The negative PCR tests were reported to The Lake County Health Department but the agency did not change its initial ruling and the Scouts were sidelined for the full 14 days.

LCHD epidemiologist Dr. Sana Ahmed told The Kerr Report why a PCR test is often recommended to accelerate a return to athletics:

Individuals who are exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 or close contacts of an infected person have a higher pretest probability of having COVID-19. Rapid molecular and antigen tests, usually provide more rapid results than the RT-PCR, but have a higher probability of missing an active infection. Therefore, it may be necessary to confirm a rapid antigen or molecular test with a PCR test especially in a setting where spread can occur rapidly.

Here is an explanation from Dr. Ahmed on how the LCHD reviews Covid-related cases and how quarantine recommendations are determined:

Based on initial information provided about exposure and risk in a COVID-19 investigation, the Lake County Health Department will provide preliminary recommendations for quarantine, isolation, and testing. Upon interview of infected persons, identification and interview of close contacts, and gathering more details of potential exposures (if possible), these recommendations may subsequently be revised. Cooperation of students, parents, and school staff in interviews, veracity of information provided, prevention strategies implemented by the school athletics team to limit transmission, and reduction of high-risk behavior among students (i.e., gatherings and travel) are important factors considered when conducting a COVID-19 investigation. If infected persons or close contacts are linked to outbreaks, or there are high-risk behaviors leading to multiple exposures placing person(s) at risk for COVID-19, or unable to obtain accurate information from infected persons or close contacts, LCHD may continue to recommend a 14-day quarantine for the entire sports team to limit spread. Once an exposure occurs, we recommend and encourage athletics teams to work with parents and students to change the high-risk activities that occur outside the field, and implement stricter mitigation strategies to prevent future recurrences. To have the possibility of a sports team, lifestyle and behavior modifications must be made by participating athletes, staff, and their families, and stricter mitigation strategies must be implemented.

But in March, the PCR tests did not lead to a revised ruling from LCHD. The Scouts were force to cancel their first two games of the season, March 10 against North Shore Country Day and March 17 against Glenbard West.

Now, in early April, In the midst of a third Covid-related quarantine, Catanzaro can’t help but wonder if she could have done anything different this time around.

“I didn’t feel as a coach it was fair to me to mandate they stay for spring break especially these seniors. They’ve had so much taken away,” Catanzaro said. “I didn’t want to take another thing from them and they had the option and they took the option. Maybe it’s on me for not requiring them to stay.”

Catanzaro is complimentary of the school’s athletic administration, especially Burkhalter, for assistance in navigating all the layers of bureaucracy when cases occur. But when a team has to quarantine, public health procedures often leave coaches completely out of the communication matrix, leading to feelings of helplessness, an emotion no coach ever wants to experience.

“They give the health department my number and I do submit practice plans and who was where. If the health department wants to call me they can but otherwise it’s handled through the (high school) and it’s out of my hands,” Catanzaro said. “Not being in the room when these calls are happening is hard. I feel like I can best advocate for my kids because they are family and I want to protect them and give them every opportunity to play.”

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Another unintended consequence of the quarantine—several field hockey players planned to try out for the lacrosse team. Lacrosse tryouts began Monday and those players are at home and can’t take part in any team sport activity.

Fortunately, Catanzaro is also the Lake Forest head girls lacrosse coach and can adjust practice schedules for missing players. But there are field hockey players who also play soccer and have had to miss that sport’s tryouts that started Monday.

Both lacrosse and soccer are cut sports. Catanzaro is used to the sometimes hard conversations with athletes when forced to explain why they didn’t make the team. But that tension is compounded this spring when athletes likely to make the team are not at tryouts.

“I have to justify to the kids who don’t make the team when there are kids that aren’t there. It adds more wrinkles to everything,” Catanzaro said. “This doesn’t effect one team but multiple groups across the school at the same time.”

Catanzaro is double vaccinated, her last dose coming two weeks ago. She is not quarantined and able to coach lacrosse.

But what she wants most now is to finish the field hockey season.

In a recent email to field hockey athletes and parents, Dr. Holland provided an update on the COVID-19 case and ongoing communication with the Lake County Health Department.

Dr. Holland wrote in the email, “(LCHD) are aware of how important this is to us and they are committed to making a final determination by Friday.”

(The Kerr Report reached out to LCHD about the LFHS field hockey case but did not receive a response by publication of this article.)

A best case scenario for Catanzaro and her team is for the LCHD to revise the quarantine from 14 to 10 days. This is not uncommon and happened to the Vernon Hills High School football team a few weeks ago.

If an abbreviated quarantine requires immediate PCR testing and negative results of athletes, according to Catanzaro, that is doable in time for the team to play a make up date with New Trier and have a Senior Day before the Illinois High School Association’s mandated April 17 end date (because field hockey is categorized an “emerging sport,” it is playing this season under IHSA rules).

“Sunday (April 4) is day zero so if we got PCR’d Monday (April 12) we could be back on the field Wednesday (April 14) or Thursday (April 15),” Catanzaro said. “New Trier has offered to reschedule the game. Our kids want it. Their kids want it. They will do whatever they can to get on the field.”

If there is no adjustment to the initial 14-day quarantine, Catanzaro said that any window to complete the season will be closed. That means no New Trier game, no Senior Day.

No closure to a season originally slated to begin in August of 2020 with high hopes of a state championship.

That’s not a scenario Catanzaro wants to think about or consider its implications.

“We are very aware as coaches of the social and emotional toll this takes on kids, being ripped away from other people, being ripped away from school, being ripped away from everything they love and it’s just devastating emotionally,” Catanzaro said. “There are a lot of people supporting us in this and trying to make it work. The hardest part is waiting and hoping.”