While the status of a high winter sports season remains uncertain due to the COVID-19 pandemic, if it does take place it will not include indoor track and field and will take place without Section III post-season events, either.
At its meeting on Thursday, the Section III Athletic Council took indoor track off of the winter slate, in large part because it did not know whether large-scale venues such as Onondaga Community College’s SRC Arena would be available.
It’s that same lack of venue availability which is keeping the section from conducting championships either in the winter season or the “Fall Sports II” campaign, set to start on March 1.
Still at issue is whether the New York State Department of Health will allow “high-risk” activities to resume. This would include winter sports basketball, ice hockey, wrestling, volleyball and competitive cheerleading.
If the state does permit it, winter sports practices in Section III for those sports, along with boys swimming and bowling, would get underway Dec. 14, moved back two weeks from the Nov. 30 date the section had agreed on earlier this fall.
Girls swimming, originally set for the fall but moved by the section’s teams to Fall Sports II, is scheduled to join football in Fall Sports II along with the other fall sports (soccer, cross country, field hockey) for schools who did not compete this autumn, including Solvay and Syracuse’s city schools.
It has proven a challenging two months even for those schools who did go ahead with sports. Dozens of practices and games had to be moved when students and teachers at many locations tested positive for COVID-19.
Schedules were constantly altered when schools went all-remote. Baldwinsville’s boys soccer team, last year’s sectional Class AA champions, had its season cut short.
Early last week, Cazenovia fall teams halted their seasons after a COVID-19 case forced dozens of students and teachers to isolate and quarantine.
