SHARING THE
FIELD
Pavel Turovski
Joshua Baxter One year after the COVID-19 outbreak changed the sports world forever, California high school athletics are finally beginning their seasons. However, each of the three sports seasons had to condense into two shortened, overlapping seasons. As a result, many sports are playing simultaneously, meaning that sharing fields and other athletic venue times for practices could be problematic. For instance, teams that typically play in the fall are just now getting their seasons underway. These sports will have to share field space with both winter and spring, such as soccer and lacrosse. “This impacts everybody, but we’re just happy to be able to play. So far, we’ve been able to practice like we normally have in previous years,” Eric Rado, head coach of varsity football, said. “We just get creative with our coaching staff, so the kids get the maximum benefit out of the situation.” As a result of sharing athletic facilities, many sports must shorten the time they are allowed to practice. According to Patrick Smith, the athletic director at Carlmont, teams might have to shorten practices to an hour or an hour and a half, rather than the usual two hours. “We’ll try to work it out so teams get some time every day, but it’s going to be less than they’re usually used to,” Smith said. Teams may also have to plan some off-days of practice
or find an unconventional practice location somewhere on campus. For example, both the baseball and softball fields have grass areas that another team may use for their practice, provided that the two respective teams are not practicing. “We’ll look at every area we can to get people out there,” Smith said. While every team will get a chance to practice and play a season, the priority is on spring sports, which didn’t get an entire season due to the outbreak of COVID-19 last year. Because of this, fall and winter sports will have significantly shortened seasons, while spring sports will get closer to an entire season. However, this also means that some teams may have to work their practices around other sports games since everything is overlapping. “If we’re hosting a soccer game, whose game times are 4:30 and 6 p.m., they end around 7:30 p.m. Usually, they start their warmups around 3:45, so a chunk of the field could be used from 3:45 to 7:30, which cuts into the amount of time that you can get out there,” Smith said. To make matters stranger, water polo, typically a fall sport, will start a few weeks after swimming. As the swim season has already begun, water polo, who began their season on March 15, had to work around the swimmers and only use the pool for practice before school and at night. Even so, working around swimmers’ schedules is nothing new for water polo. Even during their regular season, the water polo team shares the pool with the Otter Swim Club, coached
26 HIGHLANDER SPORTS
