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MHSAA: No specific plans for winter contact sports, until MDHHS clears them to begin full activity

By: MATTHEW B. MOWERY, January 25, 2021, 5:25 pm

If you were holding out hope for a plan, while you wait for winter contact sports to be able to resume … well, there will be a little longer wait for that, too.

The Michigan High School Athletic Association — with most of its personnel at Ford Field for the football finals at the time — felt caught off guard when the current pause in play was extended last Friday morning by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, but announced Monday that a plan to deal with that won’t be forthcoming just yet. 

It’ll have to wait until it gets the clearance from MDHHS to begin full activity again. 

“We are unable to provide specific plans yet as we are still evaluating the best options for delivering a memorable experience for 60,000 athletes involved in Winter contact sports. We will continue asking questions and advocating for all of our schools and athletes as we work toward building our next plans for seasons in basketball, competitive cheer, ice hockey and wrestling. We will be ready with specific timelines as soon as MDHHS clears contact sports to begin full activity,” MHSAA executive director Mark Uyl said in a Monday news release. “We have said from the start of the 2020-21 school year that we would do everything possible to have three seasons, and play all three to completion. Our strong advocacy for all sports and seasons — and especially Winter sports — continues every day.”

Before Friday, it was hoped that the contact, indoor winter sports — wrestling, boys and girls basketball, competitive cheer and ice hockey — could begin after Feb. 1, when the then-current epidemic order was due to expire. At Friday’s news conference, that start point was extended by three weeks until Feb. 21, at the earliest. 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer addressed questions about the potential resumption of those sports earlier than Feb. 21 in Monday’s news conference.

“It’s important that we keep watching the numbers,” Whitmer said. “I understand the concerns that parents and athletes have and their desire to reengage. But I also point to some of the events that happened in the last couple of days. We are seeing this variant growing around Washtenaw County and around the University of Michigan campus. I want to commend the University of Michigan for taking the actions (putting athletics on a two-week pause) that they did. We think those are the right steps to keep people safe and our job is to curtail the spread of this new variant in Michigan,” Gov. Whitmer said.

“We’ve got to not let our guard down. We have reengaged restaurants to a certain extent that will increase the amount of people out and about and I think it’s important that we stay very focused on where the numbers are before we take additional steps.”

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