Despite UIL green light, at least one Texas high school won’t play football and volleyball this fall

The first University Interscholastic League high school volleyball games in Texas were allowed to start on Monday. Schools in classifications 4A-1A are 17 days away from being cleared to play their first football games.

Ben Bolt, a 2A school about an hour drive west of Corpus Christi, will be participating in neither, according to The Corpus Christi Caller-Times, becoming the first known UIL school to cancel volleyball and football seasons.

The Ben Bolt-Palito Blanco ISD school board voted last Monday to only allow virtual instruction for the first nine weeks of school, which meant no extra-curricular activities during that time, The Caller-Times reported.

“If we wait until the week of Nov. 2 to start, then the season is over,” Ben Bolt athletic director Gary Cunningham told The Caller Times.

The district certification deadline — the final day to determine district playoff representatives — for 4A-1A volleyball is scheduled for Oct. 27. For football, the deadline is Nov. 7. The Caller-Times reported that Ben Bolt’s cross country team can train individually in preparation for its district meet, which is scheduled to happen after the first nine weeks of the semester have passed.

Jim Wells County, where Ben Bolt is located, has had 724 people test positive for COVID-19. It’s also reported 15 coronavirus-related deaths.

The news of Ben Bolt’s cancellation comes as dominoes continue to fall in the college football landscape. The Mid-American Conference became the first FBS conference to cancel fall sports on Saturday. On Monday, a report from the Detroit Free Press said the Big Ten plans to cancel fall sports, also, with an eye toward possibly moving them to spring.

Nearly 30 states plan to start fall high school athletics on time.

What other states and organizations have done hasn’t been the focus of the UIL’s plans.

“We were aware of what other states were doing,” UIL deputy director Jamey Harrison told The Dallas Morning News last month, “but each state has to make decisions that are best for them based on their state’s circumstances ... Right now, we do know that we have a large number of schools that have told us they are able to have school, they are able to compete and want to compete, and can do so now. If we were to take that opportunity away from them now, betting on it being better in the future, we don’t know what we end up. Going with the plan like we have now gives schools the best opportunity to compete, and we still have a later delay model available to us. We didn’t want to take the fall off the table.”

The News reached out to the UIL for an additional interview request Monday in light of rolling college football cancellations but didn’t hear back at the time of publishing.

Texas high school sports has already seen the presence of coronavirus. The UIL allowed summer strength and conditioning to resume on June 8. In a little more than three weeks that followed, at least 215 schools across the state suspended their operations because of positive COVID-19 tests among participants or because of rapid spread around the state. The UIL then urged schools to suspend workouts from July 3-12.

Last week, the UIL’s Medical Advisory Committee passed a motion requiring student athletes who test positive to be cleared by a physician before they could practice or play again. It was the only return-to-play protocol the committee passed. As for other aspects of competing in high school sports during a pandemic, the committee recommended following Centers for Disease Control guidelines. School districts would be in charge of deciding whether or not they wanted to compete in fall athletics.

During the committee meeting, Harrison said he believes high school athletics can operate safely — even in places where only remote learning is allowed.

“When [students] do come in and meet with their coaches and their band directors and those adults that have a real impact on them and their behavior, they at least have the opportunity to have someone outside of their Mom and Dad impress upon them the dangers of the virus and the social responsibility they all should be practicing,” Harrison said.

“When it comes to mitigating risk it doesn’t mean those efforts are going to have a perfect result. They’re clearly not. Kids are still kids, but we do have coaches having an opportunity to at least try and impact that behavior and also provide them an opportunity, in the athletics word in particular, to conduct these where professional educators are setting up the risk-mitigation guidelines, as opposed to the same kids in the same sports, in the same counties, in the same towns, walking across the street and playing the exact same sport just with a club uniform on, instead of doing it at school.

“There’s a whole lot of complexities to this conversation, but most people won’t get into and most people don’t care to, frankly. It’s easier just to say, ‘How can we do this if we’re not doing that?’ but when you really get into deep discussions with educators and with big leaders, you find out that there’s a real need for this, and a way to do it that hopefully will have a positive impact on mitigating [coronavirus] spread instead of what people are assuming, and that’s it’s going to have a very negative impact on the spread.”

School districts across the state have decided to proceed with fall sports as allowed, but Ben Bolt won’t be joining them.

Find more high school sports stories from The Dallas Morning News here.

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