Presented by
PSA
in the Time of
COVID BY KENT MCDILL
T
he coronavirus struck, and the world shut down. Soon thereafter, PSA Executive Director Jimmie Santee took action. Knowing the PSA had a membership of 5,000-plus coaches operating without facilities or students and in need of guidance, Santee determined that there needed to be available outreach to those coaches. He enlisted the knowledge and enthusiasm of events chairman Patrick O’Neill, and two webinar series were created: Safe at Home and Coaching Forward. Here are the stories about those two webinar series.
Safe at Home “As Events Chair, I am always looking to create webinars and seminars, and when the pandemic hit, we weren’t going anywhere for seminars,” O’Neill said. “We realized coaches would be staying at home, and it was our goal to build a community with our coaches, and bring them together at this critical and unusual time. “The first series we started was Safe at Home, primarily focused on the immediacy of the problem, discussing things like ‘what is coronavirus?’ and “how can coaches protect themselves’,” he said. One attendee of previous PSA seminars and webinars is Tenley Brownwright, who took time in between figure skating coaching sessions to earn a PhD in epidemiology from the University of PIttsburgh. When the coronavirus struck, she kept an eye on how the PSA was apprising coaches of concerns related to the virus, and offered her services as an expert on the matter. Thus, the Safe at Home webinar series had a knowledgeable person to provide guidance. “I did two webinars,” she said. “The first one was probably 50 percent what COVID was and general infor-
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mation, and the second half of that first one was looking forward to, when rinks open, what life was going to be like. “The second one (created in mid-July) was a lot later, when everyone knew what COVID was,” she added. “That one was very tailored to coaches. How do you assess risk in an ice rink environment, what do we do to keep ourselves safe at the rink. I talked about really specific things, like should you wear gloves, should you wear a mask, should you put kids on the pull harness, things like that.” As you probably recall, at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, advice about avoiding the virus was sporadic and scattered. Advice about wearing masks started with a statement saying they did not help, followed by stern warnings that they were necessary. Such changes made Brownwright’s task a bit more dicey. “I worried about that a lot,” she said. “I worried I was going to do a webinar and the next day everything I said was going to be wrong. But, in both seminars, I stated the day I was giving the webinar, and noted that science changes quickly, so that the advice I am giving you now may not be true if you are watching this weeks from now.” Brownwright added information for coaches to use to find out current Centers for Disease Control warnings as well as how to determine any legal questions that might come up specific to rinks in certain states. “One of the problems is that ice rinks can be really crowded, there are a lot of people,” Brownwright said. “It is indoors and you are at higher risk when you are indoors because there is less ventilation. It is cold, and we think cold may increase risk. It can be difficult to wear a mask when you are on the ice. “But there are ways to stay safe,” she said. “Figure skating is a lot safer than a lot of other sports in this situation. It is not a contact sport, for the most part. There are ways to be
