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PITTSBURGH (Newsradio 1020 KDKA) - As efforts continue to be made to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in Pennsylvania, the Wolf administration on Thursday recommended delaying high school sports until January 1, 2021.
While they had been preparing to begin fall sports, the PIAA decided to pause plans for two weeks following the administration's recommendation in hopes that they can have discussions with state leaders in that time to get clarification and further guidance.
Executive Director of the WPIAL Amy Scheuneman said Monday that she is “frustrated” with Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s recommendation to postponed high school sports until January 1 and says the organization is letting students and parents know they are working to have sports this fall.
On Tuesday she told the KDKA Radio Morning Show, "Yesterday's announcement was to allow folks to know why we are where we are; to give a background of that, to let them know to be patient as we work through the next couple of weeks and this is going to be the starting time of fall sports and a lot of student athletes, based on the information that we provided to them, were ready to go. We just wanted to let them know that we are fighting for them and that we are going to do what we can to hopefully get something for them this fall."
While many schools in the region are opting for at least partial online learning for the start of the school year, Scheuneman said whether a school has in-person or online learning doesn't have to impact a decision for all sports. "I'm sure a lot went into their decisions as school districts have been speaking all summer about what works best for them. How that impacts athletics is you have athletic teams that are all smaller sizes than your large population, so can they effectively offer a tennis program that has seven starters on it that they can easily separate on a bus to play a match and be socially distant and safe during that time and the same for golf and/or cross-country in the late fall.
"So, there are things that sports can happen safely where school may not be as easy in person, therefore I think their decision to go online or hybrid may not necessarily impact it as much as you would think because it's a separate entity in regards to how it's approached."
Scheuneman said she'd like Governor Wolf "to be open-minded and actually sit down and talk about what is safe and what isn't in his opinion and then we can go from there as far as what sports we can maybe offer and not just saying it's all cancelled and we're just moving on.
"There are some things, as I mentioned before, that can happen in an environment where we're not increasing the risk of the spread of the virus," she said. "So if he could edit or revise his statements, maybe if he has specific sports in mind, that he could identify those and we can move forward with the other ones. I think that is a possible compromise."