Prep sports: CCS finalizes plans for COVID-altered spring playoffs

The Central Coast Section on Monday finalized plans for postseason competition in most sports, the outlines of which commissioner Dave Grissom previously shared with this news organization.

All team sports in Season 2 will have an opportunity at postseason play under the CCS plan, and in a new addition, boys’ and girls’ golf gained approval for their tournaments at Laguna Seca Golf Ranch in Monterey. Other individual sports, however, faced too many obstacles, Grissom said Monday in a news release. Individual tennis, wrestling, badminton, and gymnastics championships were officially canceled, but Grissom said the section hoped to “soon” have an announcement regarding two outdoor sports, swimming and track & field.

“While it was the intention of the CCS to hold these events this year, the myriad of obstacles has presented itself to be too great for these events to occur,” Grissom said of the indoor individual sports in the news release. “We are actively working with the six counties that compose the CCS regarding individual sports that are outdoors.”

The obstacle in many individual sports, Grissom said in an interview earlier this month, was the format of competition. Rules have been relaxed, but multiple contests against different opponents in the same day is still barred by the California Department of Public Health. The rule was particularly hard to work around in round-robin tournaments like badminton and wrestling, Grissom said.

For sports that host competitors from multiple schools for a meet at a single site, like swimming and track & field, the host county must first sign off, then each county with a competing school must then give its sign-off.

For all team sports — boys and girls soccer, tennis, boys volleyball, boys and girls basketball, boys and girls lacrosse, baseball and softball — it’s full steam ahead for the first postseason competitions since the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted spring sports playoffs in March 2020.

Two weeks ago, when Grissom shared the initial CCS plan, CIF executive director Ron Nocetti said the statewide governing body had not yet made a decision regarding regional or state playoffs for Season 2 sports. At the time, Nocetti said CIF would wait for its sections to act before it came to a decision, which he said was expected at the end of April or first week of May.

In the North Coast Section, commissioner Pat Cruickshank has stuck to the section’s plan to move forward without postseason play in any sports this spring.