What will happen with fall sports is anyone’s guess

Football teams from the area were set to meet Friday night for a preseason jamboree in Dexter.

It didn’t happen.

“In an effort to protect our fall sports season, we have made the decision to cancel our football jamboree,” Dexter Athletic Director Josh Dowdy said in a statement Thursday night.

A similar statement was released when Sikeston and Cape Central also canceled a jamboree between the two schools. Central doesn’t have a season-opening opponent while Jackson has penciled in a third different school in the spot.

In July, the state coaches association recommended that teams not play in jamborees for a similar reason.

Back then there was hope of saving the fall sports season if cases of COVID-19 around the state didn’t rise and to avoid outbreaks among student athletes. It was a wake-up call to coaches and athletes that they needed to be proactive and protect themselves and their teammates.

Unfortunately, not everybody has been willing to chip in and help out.

The average number of new cases reported daily statewide has increased 70% since mid July.

It’s important to remember the actual number of cases are likely much higher because many people can not have any symptoms, spreading the virus without knowing it.

The unknown is what shut everything down in March.

Back then, you could see it coming from the horizon like an oncoming car’s lights in the dark on a long stretch of road. It was getting bigger and brighter as it approached.

Now as the fall sports season nears, it feels like driving down that same dark highway waiting for a deer to jump onto the road.

The COVID-19 pandemic is out there, everywhere, affecting everyday life in many strange and scary ways.

It seems trivial to be worrying about playing high school sports at a time when even the professional leagues are struggling.

But here we are after two weeks of practice and one more before the start of games. With every change of schedule or cancelation there’s rumor and fear.

It was during this time in March that MSHSAA put the breaks on the spring season. There was hope that the playoffs might be saved once schools opened back up but that never happened.

There was hope things would be better by the fall.

As of Thursday, the NFHS reported that football had been postponed to spring in California, Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Vermont, which is allowing schools to play touch football.

There are 37 state associations that have modified their season while Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee are among the 14 states that are business as usual to an extent.

Unlike last spring, MSHSAA has a backup plan for an “alternate fall season” to be followed by an “alternate spring season” starting in March 2021. It gives officials the option of not playing this fall and the St. Louis public city schools announced it will do just that.

Will this be the first domino to fall leading to spring football for all Missouri schools?

We should know by Sept. 11, the date MSHSAA has set for schools to decide if they want to wait until the spring.

There’s hope that a vaccine or universal testing will be able to turn things back to normal again, but until then we’re going to be driving in the dark.

All we can do is keep our eyes on the road and hope for the best until the sun comes up.