The PIAA announced on Friday that high school fall sports will move forward this, going against the recommendation of the Wolf Administration.
Practice for several sports began Monday.
The board voted 25-5 in favor of moving forward.
Schools can make their own decisions on whether they have sports or not as long as they follow proper safety guidelines.
One of the guidelines is that no fans be in attendance for any games, and The Fan’s Colin Dunlap has a problem with that.
The outdoor limit for gatherings in Pennsylvania is 250 and 50 in Allegheny County.
Dunlap says he doesn’t understand with large protests taking place around the area and county, why parents and can’t responsibly watch their children.
Softball and baseball happened all summer and fall ball is now underway with parents watching and without incident.
Dunlap says it’s frustrating being called a bad parent for taking his daughter to softball practice and watching her while large groups are protesting the police and other social justice issues without a word.
He adds that it’s not that he doesn’t support these social issues, but he doesn’t think that there should be a one-size-fits-all for gatherings.
“I’m tired of people of people being the arbiter of what’s important to other people and we’ve gotten into hat here and its B.S., we’ve turned a blind eye to allowing 500, 600 whatever people allowed to protest wherever they want to, helping them, blocking traffic, blocking law abiding citizens from trying to get from point A to point B and then you wonder why people who want to go see their kids football games don’t take it kindly,” said Dunlap.
Dunlap says that when he hears about contact tracing data showing that very few cases of COVID-19 have resulted from protests, the same logic could be applied to summer sports and the low number of cases there.
Fan Sports director Jeff Hathhorn says that schools should be able to allow fans at a reduced capacity but that the with the no fans directive from the PIAA, districts don’t have to worry about what parents can attend and what ones cannot.
“We’re a country where we’re told we can gather for causes; we can gather for things that are important to us, we can peacefully get together, we’ve now gotten into only being able to do that if it suits what you think is right,” said Dunlap.