This season South’s football team has seen two of its games traditionally played on Friday nights, moved to Saturday. The unusual setting of these games was not in the initially proposed schedule but was incorporated during the course of the season. Football isn’t the only sport seeing their events rescheduled: both the soccer and volleyball teams have had to stay flexible all season amid venue changes.
According to Brian Armstrong, the Athletic Director at South, there are three major factors affecting the changing schedules; all of which can be traced directly back to the pandemic.
The first is a nationwide shortage of officials. Debi Hanson, Associate Executive Director of the Oregon Athletic Officials Association (OAOA), said that OAOA was facing dwindling numbers of officials even before the pandemic shut the country down:
“Before COVID our numbers were slowly decreasing in terms of officials, for all sports but especially high school sports. […] Numbers have been steadily declining and [the reasons for] some of those are sportsmanship, some of those were just from age or people moving,” she said. “Then when COVID hit and everything changed last spring, the numbers probably went down 40 or 50 percent for a lot of groups. This fall our numbers have maybe gone back up some. We were probably down almost half and now are probably 60 or 70 percent of where we were statewide but we’re still very short.”
After taking two years off it is unlikely that many of the tenured officials will come back this year. In addition to this, the OAOA is up against a recruitment issue and is currently facing many situations where they have to schedule new referees in varsity contests before they’ve gained experience in lower-level competitions.
“Soccer for instance, optimally you want three, four officials in a soccer match and if you can only put two they’re going to miss things; when parents scream at those officials because they missed things that makes them not want to officiate anymore. […] So yes COVID affected numbers but the lack of numbers affected sportsmanship […] so you get this ripple effect.” Hanson said.
The OSAA and OAOA have done their best in order to limit the number of games needing to be canceled. In some cases, the schedules have been adjusted to have JV contests placed directly before the Varsity contests in order to make the most of officials’ availability.
The second factor impacting scheduling this year is a lack of transportation. Much like the shortage of officials, dwindling numbers of bus drivers were only exacerbated as a result of the pandemic. Several athletic events have been postponed because of this.
The final factor affecting athletics scheduling is COVID-19 outbreaks among teams. According to the Salem Keizer Public School’s Website, if there’s a report of a positive covid case in a classroom, team bus or in a district facility, the district’s COVID-19 Response Team and District Health Authority will begin an investigation in order to determine if there was anyone in close contact with that student. If this student is an athlete, it is not unlikely that the entire team or a group of student-athletes may be required to quarantine. Armstrong predicts that the end of the pandemic, whenever it comes, will reduce its impact on scheduling, but that the shortage of officials and bus drivers could affect athletics long after.
