we had a zoom meeting with the athletic department last night with some encouraging/discouraging (depends how you view it, I guess) updates. right now, California (CIF...our overriding HS sports org) has the sports split into 2 seasons: winter and spring. further, the go/no go decision for each sport is dependent on CDC guidelines and the conditions of the sport. outdoor high contact sports like football and LAX are in the orange group (second to least restrictive). indoor high contact sports (or high spit content, I guess) sports like hoop, wrestling and competitive cheer are in the yellow or least restrictive tier. baseball is in the red or second to most restrictive. sports like swimming and cross country (outdoors, little to no contact) are in purple or the most restrictive.
sports can go if the county is in the assigned tier or better during the season. for baseball, that means we have to be in red during the spring season (april to june). we were told that conditioning (not sports related) can start for spring sports in February and practices in mid March. Games start in april. here's the confusing (as if all of the previous wasn't confusing enough) part: if the county isn't our tier or better, teams can practice but not play games, so it looks like it will be week to week, even if we get the season to start at all.
to add a cherry on top, you'd think that the purple tier winter sports could get going now since there's no worse tier but most of California is under a stay at home order due to a low percentage of ICU beds available (I think I last read there's about 3% ICU capacity in my county...San Bernardino and Los Angeles are at 0%). Only Sacramento and a couple of counties in Northern California are above the 15% threshold that would lift the stay at home order. because of this, purple tier sports can't play yet.
it sucks, but I get it. the ICU capacity thing is the really scary part for me, as a parent who's made his share of trips to the ER for sports injuries. nothing serious yet, thankfully, but the possibility is always there and, I imagine, the highly impacted ICU situation would have a trickle down effect to other hospital services.
now, all we can do is stay safe and healthy and hope that the other idiots in our state start to do the same so we can bring our numbers down.