From atop the rows of purple steel bleachers, Athletic Director Bradley Smet greets the masked student athletes filing in from across Piedmont for track practice. Computer in hand, he checks to make sure that they’ve filled out their daily covid screeners. For these athletes, who have been practicing for months, a competition season is now on the horizon.
The state of California has categorized high school sports into four risk levels, determining the time when their seasons are permitted to begin, cross country and track and field among the sports allowed to compete in a purple tier county, Smet said.
“As we move through the tiers in our county, we’re going to start playing those sports: having practices and competitions,” Smet said.
Now that the stay at home order has been lifted for Alameda County, as of Jan. 25, sports in the purple tier may begin their seasons.
“CIF came out and said the earliest start date we can have is Feb. 1, and that’s across the board for everyone,” Smet said.
For the cross country and track team, the season will be starting this February. However, track and field and cross country will happen concurrently.
“Being that it’s late in the year, and our two running sports [cross country and track and field] falling within the purple tier, we are going to be having a combined team that will be called the Track and Field team,” running coach Jeanine Holmund said.
Cross country races will be on Saturdays, held virtually—meaning that athletes from different teams time themselves separately and compare the times instead of running together in the same race—while track meets will happen primarily on weekdays, with both teams present, Holmund said. The team will have its first two meets on Feb. 27 and Mar. 6.
However, besides the students running both cross country and track and field through the combined season, PHS students will be limited to one in-person extracurricular at a time. Along with CIF’s announcement of the season start date, they also revoked a recent rule change which had allowed students to play a club sport concurrently with school sports.
“The state of California is saying that you can only be in one cohort at a time, at least when it comes to extracurriculars,” Smet said. “The thing I want kids to know, and it stinks, is that you can only be on one team at a time… and you can only be in one conditioning pod at a time.”
While some purple tier sports such as cross country and track and field are headed into their seasons, other lower tier sports like water polo have found other ways to train without violating the covid restrictions.
“What we are doing is we’re having workouts three days a week–Wednesday, Tuesday, Friday,” said PHS water polo coach John Savage. “We’ve also started to incorporate film sessions on days where weather doesn’t permit us to be outside. Like last week we had a couple big storms, so we watched game film from the US Men’s Olympic Team and broke that down. And then we’ll go and watch our own game [for comparison].”
Unlike the water polo and track and field teams, the PHS swim team hasn’t been able to practice regularly, even though they are in the purple tier because they haven’t yet secured a pool to practice in, senior Noah Kwong said.
“Our club team has been able to secure space in Montclair and Alameda, but we’re not sure where the school team is going to practice going forward,” Kwong said.
Nevertheless, his club team has been practicing regularly, though no longer swimming both before and after school.
“It’s felt pretty normal, even though we’re practicing less. We’re still able to get a workout in and it feels like we’re where we need to be,” Kwong said.
For basketball, the season can only reopen if the county moves into the yellow tier. Throughout quarantine, the team has shifted between conditioning officially as a team at a park in Berkeley and doing student-led circuit workouts over facetime, junior Hannah Govert said.
“We still have been doing team bondings, so we can still be connecting with our teammates, which I think is really good,” Govert said. “Those have been very fun.”
Govert imagines going out there and trying her best for next year, but for now doesn’t anticipate having a season.
“I feel really bad for our seniors, because they’re amazing and they deserve a senior season. I’m just not sure that’s going to happen, and that makes me very sad,” Govert said.
