Coronavirus: Santa Clara County deals potential crushing blow to high school sports

Santa Clara County officials unveil new, stricter youth sports rules at meeting with school superintendents.

New health restrictions in Santa Clara County that extend beyond the current statewide mandate could deal a fatal blow to the prospect of a spring high school sports season in the county.

The new measures, which were unveiled at a meeting of school superintendents Tuesday afternoon, prohibit any practice or competition between two “stable groups,” which would be defined as individual teams.

Indoors, “stable groups” must be kept in separate rooms and outdoors, they must keep at least 25 feet apart. Additionally, the county will require at least six feet of distance be kept among participants, even within a single group, and bar any travel beyond county lines to skirt the new rules.

The new restrictions took school and youth sports officials by surprise. It stunned some coaches to the point of tears.

“My position has gone from trying to be like the coach of a district and the optimist to being the person that always has to act like you worry, and manage expectations because every single time stuff like this happens,” said Don Austin, the superintendent of Palo Alto Unified School District. “You’ll see on there where it literally says that if you’re going to go between stable cohorts — which in our case, stable cohorts are teams — if we’re going to play Los Altos in something, we can do that as long as we maintain 25 feet of spacing. What sport is that? I have never come across that one yet.”

Dave Grissom, the commissioner of the Central Coast Section, which governs the majority of the high schools in Santa Clara County, said last week that he was in communication with county officials and that they had assured him the county would not go beyond the state Department of Public Health in limiting access to youth sports once the stay-at-home order was lifted.

“I reached out to the counties asking if they foresaw (stricter rules) being an issue moving forward, just so that my member schools were aware of that, for instance, maybe Santa Clara would be more restrictive or maybe San Mateo would be more restrictive,” Grissom said. “And Santa Clara, historically, has been a little bit more restrictive than other counties. But Santa Clara has told me that the expectation is that they will not be more restrictive, that they will follow along with the California Department of Public Health. Now, I say that, and they have the choice to later go back on that.”

The CCS is scheduled to have a webinar meeting with Santa Clara County officials Thursday, Grissom said in an interview last week with the Bay Area News Group.

It has been a rollercoaster week of emotions for coaches and athletes alike who on Monday received their first sign of hope in nearly a year, when Gov. Gavin Newsom lifted the stay-at-home order, which permitted sports in the purple reopening tier to begin competition.

That prompted a mad scramble for leagues around the Bay Area to set schedules and begin practices with the prospect of competition on the horizon. The two leagues that comprise a majority of the schools in Santa Clara County, the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League and the Blossom Valley Athletic League, had just in recent days finalized schedules to return to competition in the coming weeks.

After Newsom’s announcement Monday, Santa Clara County Counsel James R. Williams told the Bay Area News Group that officials would follow state guidelines on high school sports.

“First of all, we have to follow the state’s guidance,” he said. “The state has put sports in different tiers. At this time only outdoor, no contact activities are allowed.”

Williams also said county officials were concerned about youth sports because of some outbreaks that have occurred, notably one involving an AAU basketball tournament in Rocklin that led to about 100 COVID-19 cases, including 77 in Santa Clara County.

“We’ve had a couple of incidents like that,” Williams said. “It’s a real source of a spread. Obviously, people love sports. But there are many, many things we love and enjoy and would like to do but are not safe.”

Now, dozens of schools and hundreds of student-athletes have had their hopes dashed once again.

Saratoga boys basketball coach Patrick Judge said he was furious when he got the news and was on the verge of tears.

“I am all about — and I have been throughout the entire pandemic — I am all about following the data and trusting our leadership that we have in place,” Judge said. “This to me is just … I can’t even put it in words. We’ve worked so hard. I want to start crying right now. We’ve worked so hard to get to where we were. We kept our kids encouraged. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

“Our cases are dropping. The vaccines are getting into more arms. We’re going back to pre-March it seems. It is so unfair. It is infuriating. There is no data that supports it. That is probably the most frustrating thing. We’re going to be the only county in the country that does not have a plan to return to sports — and 25 feet is not a plan.”

Nelson Gifford, Palo Alto’s athletic director and football coach, said no one saw Tuesday’s news coming.

“It’s a failure of leadership at the highest level,” Gifford said. “The lack of transparency going into this process, it’s insulting and truly it’s harmful to everyone involved. There is so much time and energy put into it, but there is a lot of emotional capital that’s invested in this as well — certainly not the least of which is that of the kids.

“The notion that San Mateo County and Santa Clara County have vastly different rules regarding competition is incomprehensible and frankly unacceptable. … It’s totally rogue, and it’s rouge in a way that, in my personal opinion, is cowardly because they didn’t say you can’t swim. They didn’t say you can’t do cross county. It’s not safe. Instead, they say 25 feet. What does that mean?”

Austin, the Palo Alto district superintendent, said he shared the slideshow screenshots with Grissom before the meeting with the county ended Tuesday, telling the section commissioner that “I think this got blown out of the water.”

In meetings with superintendents from his league, Austin said they all aimed for transparency.

“All of us wanted to avoid false hope,” Austin said. “That was one of the things we were most nervous about is saying we’re going to do something and creating false hope. We just had so many assurances that here’s the playbook. Here are the rules and when we get out of stay-at-home, this is what we’ll do. We’re out of stay-at-home. We’re all excited. And almost immediately the rules changed.

“County-wide they were saying the numbers are going in the right direction. So conditions improve, stay-at-home comes off and our reward is the canceling of sports. But you can go out to dinner and get your hair done.”

Staff writer Elliott Almond contributed to this report.

This is a developing story. More details will be added when they become available.