CoVID-19’s absurdity in the United States dealt a painful but inevitable blow on Wednesday.
The fall 2020 sports season at the University of West Florida has noticed that its last chance of normalcy has been erased, with the Gulf South Conference officially postponing the festival in sports such as football, volleyball, football and basketball until January 1 at the earliest.
Demanding situations in school football, i.e. Division II football, have become more apparent over the summer as the pandemic evolved and other sports leagues provided information on what was needed on the trial and containment front.
More: UWF football, Southern Gulf Conference sports postponed until January due to COVID-19
UWF athletic director Dave Scott recently noted that check delays are a major impediment for NCAA Division II organizations to isolate the virus.
It’s a delight I know very well. My COVID-19 tests (unfortunately, I took five) did not go back for six days or more, a disruptive duration for those without the virus and largely dead for those in poor health while waiting for the results.
The U.S. professional leagues have been fortunate to restrict exposure to COVID-19 through “bubbles,” although they are costly efforts for school establishments and are in fact not foolproof, as has been seen with containment violations in the NBA and MLB.
The controversy over the impending collapse of 2020 school football has focused on the factor of player safety, and rightly so.
But it is forgotten that school football systems exist downstream from functional and fitness communities. Bus drivers, hotel employees, test facilities and countless other behind-the-scenes operations are very important elements of the process, presenting a different set of monetary and fitness hazards than a 20-year open receiver.
More: Florida Board of Governors asks UWF to pay $2.4 million for Complete Florida Plus
As for how situations have evolved at this point, I find it difficult not to go back two months ago as a turning point towards Wednesday’s inevitability. (I don’t tell this story to blame, just to describe the facets of my own delight that fit the demanding situations facing school football.)
Customers for a UWF football season began to fade into my eyes after seeing the effects of the reopening of Phase 2 in June, an era in which enclosed citizens flocked to their favorite restaurants and bars after two and a half months of “quarantine.” “
Many other people I knew were back in the downtown hot spots before COVID like World of Beer and O’Reilly’s Irish Pub the weeks of reopening. On June 11, the latter even enjoyed a participation on Thursday night not much different from that of the past “College Nights”: elbow by side, resonant music and drinks in the kind of atmosphere that has long been O’Reilly productive bars in the center of Pensacola.
Even though I wasn’t there on June 11, I contacted other people who were. Five of them developed symptoms and tested positive early the following week.
My symptoms started several days later. In my experience, COVID-19 is prominent for the variability of its symptoms. Whether it’s fever, tiredness, aches or chest pressure, each had its biggest crack in me for several hours at a time. I feel blessed because the peak of my symptoms was only one day, June 21, when every symptom, every dream, reached its climax.
The effects of my COVID-19 control at the University of West Florida returned 3 days later, a week after my swab was bitten on my nose. However, the positive verification served to make sure that what I had experienced was really the genuine treatment, my frame languished in the post-COVID “mental fog” that many others experienced.
It was only fortunate (and perhaps by divine intervention) that my grandparents, who had visited me from Tennessee from June 13-15, were not among those who were swept away by June’s business fever.
On June 26, the Florida Department of Commercial and Professional Regulation called for some other prevention to sell alcohol on the site, but COVID-19 is already here to remain until the end of June. Daily totals of infections would set new all-time highs on a normal basis for weeks, coinciding with the expected return of school football.
In mid-July, perhaps feeling the now imminent option that COVID-19 would have an effect on the school football season, UWF head coach Pete Shinnick appeared in the UWF’s face-to-face canopy campaign, joining other school administrators, teachers and academics. urging citizens to wear a fall mask. school football a reality.
Unfortunately, the road to a school football season in the fall of 2020 would possibly have already been lost at this stage.
The pandemic returned me to a novel in my AP literature categories in high school. With the not-so-dramatic war of an Algerian city opposed to an oppressive contagion, Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” describes much of Camus’s philosophy on absurdity, the clash between the preference for the target, and the control of Americans in a chaotic and irrational environment. .
As the pandemic continues to exert an unprecedented influence on the paintings of society, deferring our highest popular cultural occasions, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the fate of school football has never been within its reach, its point of no return has long passed. Past.
You can contact Eric J. Wallace at [email protected] or 850-525-5087.