With Illinois high school hoops in COVID limbo, metro-east teams find games in St. Louis
By 7:30 p.m., the Center St. Louis sports complex, in Affton, Missouri, was filled with high school basketball players and their parents, some of whom were pulling double-duty as coaches.
Most of them had crossed the river from Illinois on this Saturday night, as judged by a survey of license plates on the cars in the parking lot.
In Missouri, high school basketball season is underway and on schedule. In Illinois, the season remains in hiatus because of COVID-19, and a new start date has not yet been been set, though the Illinois High School Association released teams in some parts of the state to begin practicing.
Southwestern Illinois, which makes up Region 4 of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Restore Illinois plan for mitigating the coronavirus spreak, remains under Tier 3 mitigation, effectively halting high school sports in the region.
Every state that borders Illinois is continuing their high school athletic seasons this winter. Only Hawaii has officially called off a high school basketball season, and Illinois is one of six states that hasn’t either already started or set a new start date for the season, according to USA Today.
So, for now, Illinois athletes are trekking across the Mississippi to compete, despite the pandemic.
For players from the metro-east — Belleville, Nashville, Collinsville, Althoff and Mater Dei were all listed on the schedule at The Center on Jan. 9 and 10 — the trip from Illinois to Missouri is little more than a 20- or 30-minute drive. Others, like those from the Bloomington-Normal area, travel two to three hours for league games.
Athletes and their parents say they need and deserve a season, especially for the seniors. They’re driving out of state every week to make it happen, despite consistent messaging from local and national health officials who say unnecessary travel increases the risk of COVID’s spread.
Ten months removed from the first school closures in March, the U.S. has surpassed 400,000 COVID deaths. The Center for Disease Control issued a warning last week about new, more contagious mutated variants of the virus.
Both Eric Ruehl, the general manager of The Center, and Jeremy Donald, an owner of the CNR Basketball league that plays there, say interest in playing this year is high. They’re struggling, in fact, to find enough space for the influx of teams that want to compete and practice.
Controversy and confusion
Basketball isn’t the only Illinois high school sport to be postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it might be the one swathed in the most controversy.
Three bodies — Pritzker’s administration, the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Illinois High School Association — offered conflicting guidance for whether high school basketball could start in November. The governor’s office and IDPH said it wouldn’t be allowed until the spring while IHSA maintained that the season would begin as scheduled.
It didn’t.
“If our student athletes are not allowed to play in our schools, they will be playing with independent teams in tournaments all across the Midwest this winter in much ‘looser’ environments,” Collinsville boys basketball coach Darin Lee told the Belleville News-Democrat in November. “The gyms will have an abundance of spectators without masks. The students and parents will then be returning to our schools and communities from other states each weekend.”
Come January of the new year, that’s exactly what his players and many of their main competitors are doing.
Since June, the “Collinsville Hawks” have played around 50 games in three states, all of which have higher COVID-19 positivity rates, fewer safety mitigations, or both, than Illinois.
Under IHSA rules, paid coaches through the schools aren’t allowed to coach club teams. The four Hawks teams — a name derived from the district’s Kahok mascot — are coached by Andy Horras “and the other dads.”
“I do care about kids’ safety,” Horras said. “There are some people who’ll think [the club team] is a really bad thing. … We were really on the fence about that at the beginning.”
Lee has continued to lobby for Illinois to allow a school sanctioned season. In a recent Facebook post, he tagged a handful of Illinois politicians, including Pritzker, and noted how many students from Collinsville and across the state were traveling to Missouri, to Iowa, to Indiana to play tournaments in packed locations.
“If we allow games through our schools, not one of these AAU-style games would have been played and no one travels outside the region,” Lee wrote. “ … Now is the time to act and reduce this senseless travel and put the school administration in control.”
Lee’s son is a senior playing on the Collinsville Hawks, and while Lee isn’t coaching them, he has shared posts about the team, including a link to the Go Fund Me Horras established. For his son and his freshman daughter to compete, Lee said they’ve traveled across state lines multiple times.
“Parents can do whatever they want. Whether that’s right or wrong — I really don’t know. I just know that that’s happening,” he said. “As a parent, I’ve decided to let him play. That’s what he wants to do. It’s his senior year. I would feel better if the schools were in charge.”
Safety protocols
In St. Louis County, where the Hawks played Jan. 9, masks are required for players on the court. Players on both teams complied, at least technically, in each of the two games the Hawks played that night.
Masks can fall or slip, hindering their usefulness, especially during a fast-paced sport. Few players managed to keep the masks up over their nose the entire time they were on the court. Many masks slipped below even the mouth, covering only the chin. Most players pulled their masks back up on their way to the bench.
The Center for Disease Control recommends wearing a mask any time you’re in a public setting or around people outside of your household — especially when you’re indoors and can’t socially distance. It’s not best practice to touch the mask while wearing it without washing your hands.
Not all local jurisdictions require players to wear masks. In a recent tournament in Bettendorf, Iowa, there was no such requirement, though masks were required when walking around the building, Horras said.
Horras said his team has its own standards -- including taking players’ temperatures on the way into a venue -- which can sometimes be more stringent than their hosts require. When it comes to wearing masks on the court, he said they follow the rules of the venue.
Temperature checks are a common precaution when screening for COVID-19, since a fever is one of the more common virus symptoms. In a statement to the New York Times, the CDC said that symptom-based screening has “limited effectiveness because these people with COVID-19 may have no symptoms or fever at the time of screening, or only mild symptoms.”
While a few athletes in the program didn’t join the league because of concerns about the virus, Horras said most families had few safety concerns specific to basketball. Players are encouraged to consider the team their “social bubble.”
Managing the risks
Sylvian Chambers has two sons playing on Hawks teams, a freshman and a senior. She said she was comfortable with the protocols because she knew the organizers of the team “wouldn’t put our kids’ health at risk.”
“We want to see our kids stay healthy and safe, but I don’t know if our family has ever had an issue or worried about them contracting anything,” she said. “ … We’re comfortable. We know it’s a real thing, because we’ve had family members who’ve contracted it but — thank God — it was mild.”
While parents and coaches said they were convinced competition could be done safely, no one denied that COVID-19 was real or suggested it wasn’t serious. Some know people who have had it; some refrained from seeing grandparents over the holidays.
There’s a growing body of research that suggests schools have not been the major contributor to community spread they were feared to be, but there’s little research available that’s specific to whether high school sports contribute significantly to spread.
The most widely-publicized study on high school sports during COVID came from the University of Wisconsin. The survey was published in October and seemed promising for the cause of continuing high school sports, but the survey was very limited and has not undergone a peer review.
The survey tracked where students athletes with the virus contracted it, but faced the same major hurdle other contact tracing has: asymptomatic spread. Only one of the 209 cases among players included in the study was traced back to participation in a sport, but nearly 30% of the cases couldn’t be conclusively traced at all.
The dean of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health, Robert Golden, told the Wall Street Journal that “we do not believe this report should play a major role in shaping [schools’] decisions.” After the Wall Street Journal wrote about the study, the National Federation of State High School Associations removed an article highlighting the study from its website.
A basketball region
Horras moved to Collinsville with his young family in 1999. He describes himself as a basketball guy and said Collinsville had a reputation as a basketball town. In fact, he said, the Southwestern Conference Collinsville competes in is stacked with strong athletes, coaches and programs.
Belleville West was the state 4A champion in 2018 and 2019, and East St. Louis was the state 3A champion in 2019.
When COVID-19 shut down the 2019–2020 season, Collinsville had just entered the sweet 16 and was well positioned to win its first state championship since legendary coach Vergil Fletcher led the Kahoks in 1965.
In some schools, the intensity of high school sports might be just a few steps above a pick-up league. In others, varsity sports are far from casual activities.
For a competitive varsity team like Collinsville has, Horras said the program is “kind of a rat race.” In third grade, there might be 100 kids who try out for the Junior Kahoks team he coaches, and every year it gets whittled down: by interest, by talent, by height.
Junior Matt Clark was looking forward to playing on the varsity team, and in particular the Collinsville Prairie Farms Holiday Classic, a tournament he’s watched since he was a little kid. He was on the practice squad with varsity last year, and while he wasn’t a dressed member of the team when the state tournament was shut down, he’s close with many of the players who were.
Clark’s mom, Robyn Clark, said it was a big deal when her son made the third-grade team, nearly 10 seasons ago — she’s a Kahoks’ alumna herself.
“The honor of playing varsity basketball at Collinsville High School is not lost on me,” she said. “ … It’s something that, more importantly, he has worked for — very, very hard — for many years. It’s not easy. It’s a very rigorous program.”
Why do they have to play
Among school administrators, the mental health benefits and self-discipline lessons student athletes take home from participation in sports has been a frequent topic of concern in the wake of a canceled season.
“We had a conversation with some of our coaches this week, that our athletes’ grades and social involvement are suffering drastically, because they don’t have the structure they’d normally have … or have access to their role models,” Collinsville Unit School District 10 Superintendent Brad Skertich said.
Skertich was one of the more than 200 superintendents who signed a letter asking the state for more leeway in letting schools conduct extracurricular activities.
Both Chambers and Clark credited basketball, at least in part, as being a motivating factor that helped their sons be successful in the classroom.
Clark Power is a big believer in the power of sports, competition and physical movement. In 2004, the professor of psychology and education at the University of Notre Dame launched Play Like a Champion, a youth sports program designed to democratize sports for all kids.
Even while calling sports a “public good,” though, Power is concerned about what COVID-19 is doing to exacerbate the culture around youth sports that he has spent more than a decade trying to improve.
The forces that are helping people rationalize playing sports during a pandemic were in play long before anyone had ever heard of “the novel coronavirus.” Power said the drive to compete despite the risks is an extension of what’s already been happening for years.
“It’s called the professionalization of youth sports. You treat the kid like you would a young professional,” Power said. “How do you get ahead, how do you get the advantage? For parents, it’s very, very competitive.”
The best example of this “professionalization” is the increasingly common “specialization.” More athletes are playing the same sport year-round, even if it overlaps with the season for another school team they’re on. Some are starting nearly year-round training before they’re even in high school.
Keeping the teams together
In some states, like Kentucky or Indiana, there’s a limit to how many players from the same school team can play on the same club team. Illinois has no such restrictions, and it shows on the league schedules.
The Collinsville Hawks changed the mascot and colors, but kept the name of the city. Looking over a league schedule, local mascots and school names pop-up, organizing themselves in the same way Collinsville has: the (East St. Louis) Flyers United Varsity, Belleville Varsity, Althoff Junior Varsity, Mater Dei Freshmen.
There are some teams in the league that have a roster spanning several high schools and cities, like the Midwest Shooters. In the metro-east, teams with players from the same school seem to be more common.
Club sports aren’t cheap, especially since gym time for practices can’t be reserved through local schools right now. It costs money — a lot of money — to play, even with volunteer coaches: There are uniforms, gym rentals, league and tournament fees, not to mention travel and hotel costs for out-of-state, multi-day tournaments.
In a Go Fund Me organized by Horras, he estimated that the cost of the alternative season would be about $225 for each of the 40 players. As of Tuesday, the team raised more than half of its $9,000 goal.
Through fundraising, the Collinsville Hawks team is trying to make the team more accessible, but the original division in youth sports is still there.
“Right now, kids that are participating in sports are a case of the haves and have-nots,” Skertich said.
School teams are the only option for many students who can’t afford to play on a club team. Then again, there are some districts where a student who can’t afford to play in the off-season might have little hope of even making the school team.
It’s more than just the money. Those students who miss out on one season will be behind their peers who played, Power said. That could make it harder for them to try to rejoin the team at school: Everyone else has a year’s progress on them.
What comes next
IHSA hasn’t officially canceled any sports season this school year, but there’s no projected start date for basketball.
A school-sanctioned season would be safer than what they’re doing now, Horras said. Whether someone agreed or not with having a school-sanctioned season right now, no one said they thought a club league was better or safer than what the schools could do.
The argument is that schools are in a better position to create and enforce safety protocols, like a limit on spectators, and travel could largely be restricted to being within the region — there’d be no need to drive to Iowa or Indiana to compete.
“As a school administrator, I have seen first-hand the decline in student interest and morale towards school, a decline I believe is the result of school-based sport programs being shut down by the state without even a discussion about their eventual return,” Lee wrote in an open letter to state officials. In addition to coaching, he’s an assistant principal at Collinsville High School.
More teenagers than ever are struggling with depression and anxiety while living through a highly disruptive and traumatic global event. At the college level, the NCAA reported that 40% of student athletes were struggling with a lack of motivation, 21% were faced with stress or anxiety and 13% felt depressed at the beginning of the pandemic.
But while some student athletes are struggling to adjust to life without their sports, others are finding ways to cope.
When basketball didn’t look like it would happen at all, senior Josh Chambers resigned himself to the decision without dwelling in negativity and decided to focus on academics.
“I saw it as a new opportunity to see how my life could look without it. I’ve never really been through life without basketball,” Chambers said. “It was a new perspective, because you can’t play forever.”
This story was originally published January 20, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
