State tournament formats could be altered
The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association said Wednesday that it remains on track to start winter sports on time despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m going to tell you what I told you in August and you’re going to smile,” executive director Bob Lombardi said while addressing the media following the PIAA Board of Directors meeting. “Cautiously optimistic.”
The first official day for winter sports practice is Nov. 20.
The PIAA brought the same attitude into the fall sports season and was able to forge ahead to the point where it has completed some state championships and is on target to hold them in other sports.
Lombardi said the PIAA Sports Medicine Committee recommended having winter sports.
“They felt as long as people have health and safety plans and there’s strict adherence to those plans and they’re enforced locally and that we can continue to keep an eye on what’s going on in the commonwealth as far as cases, we could take a step-by-step cautious approach and we could get winter started and see how far we can go,” Lombardi said. “If something comes up and we need to adjust or shut down or those type of things, we’ll do it. Part of their commentary we had the other night was just take the fall. If we arbitrarily shut down and didn’t take the step-by-step approach, we wouldn’t have gotten anything in. And we would be coming here and say ‘Look at all the weeks we missed.’”
That doesn’t mean winter sports of basketball, wrestling, swimming and competitive cheer will look the same as last year. The PIAA steering committees in those sports presented proposed changes because of the pandemic.
Among the numerous changes were cutting the number of state qualifiers in swimming for each event from 32 to 16, possibly reducing the number of teams in the state team wrestling championships and adding several health and safety measures for all winter sports.
None of the recommendation of the steering committees are official. However, no board member voiced opposition to any of the proposed changes. The board has another meeting scheduled for Nov. 18.
