At Springfield, coach Maurice Douglass had a similar message for his Wildcats, who lost one week short of the state championship game last season.
“We always talk to the kids about you’re not promised tomorrow,” Douglass said. “Especially in this game and now this year, we could play one game and it could all be over so we have to take advantage of every day that we have and maximize it.”
The regular season has been set at six weeks with the playoffs to include everyone who wants to take part no matter how many games they play before the tournament begins.
Those decisions are a nod to the potential for COVID-19 numbers to rise again in late fall or early winter and an acknowledgment seasons are likely to be disrupted by positive cases.
North of Cincinnati, Kings High School announced Thursday its game against Winton Woods was canceled because of a positive COVID-19 test on the Kings team.
That is not likely to be the last time that happens, and many games that do go on are likely to do so without a starter here or key contributor there.
With the nature of a contagious virus and CDC recommendations for quarantining close contacts for 14 days, units of teams or even full squads could be sidelined at some point or another as well, but that was not something coaches who were interviewed were ready to worry about until it happens.
“It’s gonna be a week-to-week thing,” Douglass said. “And that’s why I have tried to overemphasize every kid’s got to be a starter. You don’t know what’s going to happen. A kid could get sick on a Thursday and not be able to play, so we’ve been trying to make sure everybody is up to par as far as understanding the system and what we’re doing each week.”
With the slimmed-down schedule, many area conferences opted to play only league games.
That of course had a major impact on the overall schedule, wiping out some backyard rivalries like Fairmont-Alter but creating a new intriguing matchup between the Knights and perennial powerhouse Clinton-Massie.
“I think we were all disappointed when Alter-Fairmont got cancelled because it’s such a gigantic game in this community for our kids, for their kids, just for the community in general, but in terms of statewide interest, this may be even bigger,” Alter coach Ed Domsitz said. “People want to know just how good Alter and Clinton-Massie are going to be this year.”
The games not only changed on paper but will also have a different look in reality.
In addition to the expansion of the sideline boxes to allow players to spread out, the crowds figure to be sparse thanks to a state rules limiting attendance to 15% of normal capacity.
“I think that will affect us to a certain degree, but it’s like any of the extraneous factors, any of those things that don’t pertain to executing and playing the game,” Domsitz said. “If you let that kind of thing bother you, if you let that get to you, then in all probability, you’re not going to be successful. We have to accept it for what it is.”
As usual, his team has a handful of college prospects. Senior running back Branden McDonald and junior linebacker C.J. Hicks (an Ohio State commit) headline the group, but more are likely to catch the eye of college recruiters this fall and earn scholarships.
Across the area, there are more players than usual who enter the fall waiting for offers after the pandemic wiped out most of the spring and summer chances to visit schools and work out for coaches in person.
“We have a lot of what you would call senior evals,” said Northmont coach Tony Broering. “That is kids who are right on the cusp of being Division I players, but coaches wanted to see him in camp and now they want to see them play their senior year.”
That includes his new quarterback Cade Rice, who transferred from Greenon and is looking to grow his group of potential suitors with a big final season. With some FCS offers already in hand, Rice joined a roster that already had a pair of Michigan recruits in receiver Markus Allen and defensive back Rod Moore and figures to put up big numbers in Broering’s pass-happy spread offense.
“Iowa State contacted me yesterday about him, so I think they might offer him,” Broering said. “Toledo called me yesterday about him, so he’s getting a lot of interest there. There’s gonna be a lot of schools at that level that want to see how he does in the GWOC, but it’s not just Cade.
“We’ve got probably six or seven or eight other guys who all started last year: our left tackle, a couple outside linebackers, a couple DBs and a couple of our other receivers.”
Like the other coaches, Broering praised the way his players have embraced anti-COVID protocols including pre-practice health checks, frequent hand-washing and maintaining social distancing when possible.
With testing not widely available or affordable enough to be done on whole teams on a regular basis, those are each team’s best defense against an outbreak.
“It’s working so far,” said Smitherman, who noted the Buccs film practice so they can evaluate who else might need to be quarantined if someone does come down with COVID-19. “We’re broken into 11 different groups so there’s a minimum of people in each group, 4-5 in each group.”
After figuring out how to practice the triple-option without players being able to touch early in the summer, now they are trying to keep the quarterbacks and fullbacks from spending too much time together in case one comes up sick. They would rather go into a game without some of those players than all of them.
“I’m worried about it every day to be frankly honest,” he said. “I want us to be as good as we can be every day. I want us to work as hard as we can work, and they’ve got a lot of things going on other than football, so you’ve always got to have that in your forefront when you’re going to attack practice.”
Butler coach John Puckett, the area’s rep for the Ohio High School Football Coaches Association, pointed out contact tracing and quarantining could vary from school to school — especially in a league as spread out as the Miami Valley League, which includes his Aviators and Smitherman’s Buccs.
“We’re not going to look too far in the future,” Puckett said. “If we get to play six games in the regular season, we feel extremely, extremely thankful for that, but the reality of the situation is that either us or maybe one of our opponents could get shut down by their health department for one or two cases. We have in our league five different county health departments with five different you know versions of how this is supposed to go.
“I mean you’re really at the mercy of the health department, so I mean we’ve been telling our kids just control what you can control with every day. Take your temperature, pay attention to how you’re feeling and mask up.”
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