The Bristol school system has made the decision to postpone the start of practices until the beginning of school on Sept. 8, despite the CIAC decision to allow member schools to resume conditioning practices this week.
The decision to delay the start was made by Bristol administrators and disclosed to the coaching staff during a virtual meeting with the administration last Friday.
When they begin, practices at first will be for conditioning and skills needed for each sport and are limited to one hour in length. The teams will not meet as a group, but rather will be divided into cohorts of 10.
The cohorts will not mix with each other and will be led through their conditioning and skill sessions by an assigned coach. Masks will be required, as will social distancing, but the athletes will be allowed to remove their masks when they are actually doing their workouts. Each athlete will be responsible for bringing their own water, as no one will be allowed to share a drinking source.
As per the CIAC timetable, teams will be able to practice together on Sept. 21, providing their Covid data is good. It is stressed very strongly in the CIAC timetable that all steps in the process will be contingent on the Covid data.
If there is an uptick in Covid cases, the process will halt, and the progression to team practices could be pushed back to more cohort work or a halt to everything, depending again on the Covid metrics.
If all proceeds smoothly, the teams can begin playing actual games on Oct. 1, with a schedule that pools schools together by regions to eliminate long bus trips for the athletes.
One interesting tidbit from the regional scheduling is that the Central-Eastern football game will be played on the first week of the season, probably on Oct. 2 or 3.
All games will also be played without spectators. Undoubtedly, this will disappoint fans, especially parents, but it is felt again by the Bristol administrators that this is the safest alternative.
All athletes will be screened daily and will not attend practice if they have any symptom of Covid. If a team member is diagnosed with Covid, contact tracing will be done to establish who else could have been exposed to the virus, one of the main reasons for the division into cohorts early on.
If one member of the cohort gets the virus, the other nine teammates will have to be quarantined for a period of time, two full weeks possibly. But without cohorts, the entire team would be exposed, with much more dire consequences for the team.
As stated in the story headline, this approach is a very cautious one, but it also obviously a very necessary approach. Let us hope that all goes well and the kids get to have some semblance of a sport experience.
You can find the entire CIAC plan for reopening at casciac.org. Click on the CIAC side of the opening page, and the Fall Sports plan can be found on the left side of the next page.