Despite TSSAA full-season OK, fball hurdles still real, feared
While the path has been cleared, thanks to Gov. Bill Lee’s Executive Order 55 going into effect, for TSSAA football and girls soccer teams to begin close contact work — full pads/hitting for football — and includes scrimmages, restrictions remain in place for Farragut High School and other Knox County Schools teams.
“We still can’t go in the locker room yet,” said Admirals football skipper Eddie Courtney, whose team was scheduled to begin full-contact workouts Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 4.
“It’s kind of day-by-day, wait-and-see,” he added.
With the regular season begins as originally scheduled the weekend of Friday, Aug. 21, Courtney’s Admirals will host Bradley Central Aug. 21 (opening kick-off, based on recent years schedules, likely would be 7:30 p.m.).
The situation on whether or not fans would be allowed inside the stadiums/fields/gyms for fall sports was still unknown at deadline Tuesday afternoon according to Donald Dodgen, FHS athletic director — though he expected some news on this following “a big” Knox County Schools meeting today (Thursday, Aug. 6).
“Everybody has three weeks to get it done” to be ready for the opening regular season game, Courtney said Tuesday.
However, about the TSSAA’s decision to play a full schedule as allowed by Lee’s order, which was announced last week, “I personally thought we were planning to do the hybrid (reduce the regular season number of games to eight and reduce the 32-team Division I, or public school teams,’ playoff format down to 16),” Courtney said, “Which would have meant (the season began the week of Friday) Sept. 18 (fifth week).
“And that gave you more weeks to kind of see where we’re going as far as all the precautions and things that might be lifted,” he added. “It gave you seven weeks to get ready to play the first game — not three weeks.”
This shorter time frame to prepare is made more difficult by all the necessary, yet time-consuming, COVID-19-prevention steps required to be followed, Courtney added.
Add protocol uncertainty to the list of difficulties.
“There’s just a lot of things, still, day-by-day we’re getting answers on,” he said.
However, the bottom line for a crazy 2020, “We’re glad we’re playing, and we’re going to try and take care of each other,” Courtney said.
