Spring Sports Season Cancelled

Details

Created on Friday, 01 May 2020 14:09

Written by Devon Distefano

VERMONT - In wake of the COVID-19 pandemic the spring sports season for schools throughout the state of Vermont has been officially cancelled.

The Vermont Principals Association decision to cancel the season came to be the only logical option as the "Stay at Home Order" was extended at least through May 15th and the school season is nearly over.

VPA Executive Director, Jay Nichols says, "Everybody else is pretty much closed, there's only four states left in the United States that are open for sports, we waited as long as we thought we could when the governor made his announcement that schools were gonna be closed there wasn't any consultation with anybody in the schools, none of us knew anything about it, we were surprised by it as well. So we said well, we're not just gonna blankly cancel spring sports because as its said in the executive orders, you can change the order at anytime, so we said if they come back to school we want the kids to have this opportunity, so we said we're gonna wait as long as we can"

The Committee's decision to wait on the cancellation brought on various complaints from people in Vermont.

"There's been a lot of pressure from people from waiting, there's a number of people saying to us ya know we wish you guys would make a decision right now, it would be easier for us for planning and we just said you know what we're gonna wait as long as we can on behalf of the kids, and there's no reason to rush this decision, they asked to make this decision in late March and we said, no we're gonna wait until April," said Nichols.

Although many people may not be happy about these circumstances, high school and college seniors are likely hurting the most, knowing they have played their last game as an athlete representing their school.

"As somebody who's coached high school baseball and girls basketball for a long time in Vermont, I would just say to them that this feels really bad right now and it's certainly a tough experience, but it's an experience that everyone in the country is going through at the same time and they're gonna look back on this and realize that ya know it was really hard, we had to be resilient through it, but ya know I'm thinking about college seniors as well, that the sport of baseball or softball may be the main thing in their lives and now their careers are ended too...but their safety and their security has to come before anything else," said Nichols.

Despite, the elimination of all spring sports Nichols remains optimistic for the start of sports in the fall, "Fingers crossed, praying that there will be, you know no way to know for sure... so yeah we're really hoping that we have fall sports, there may have to be more safety procedures in place and we don't know right now what those may look like... but we need a lot more information before we start making decisions related to the fall, right now we're going to proceed as though we're going to have a fall season, we're gonna do everything we can to give the kids a season".

For more information visit https://vpaonline.org/