As it did earlier with basketball, District 2 has altered sites, dates and formats for swimming and wrestling championships in order to make the adjustments needed to try to get those events completed during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The District 2 committee made those decisions for swimming Thursday and continued discussions for a wrestling format that it hopes to be able to confirm as early as Monday.
Swimming will be moved to the far reaches of the district, near the New Jersey and New York borders while wrestling still does not have a confirmed site.
The diving portion of the District 2 Swimming and Diving Championships will remain at the Wyoming Valley Catholic Youth Center in Wilkes-Barre, but the swimming is headed to Delaware Valley High School in Milford.
Committee members voted unanimously to put this year’s championships at Delaware Valley High School March 6-7. While CYC management was comfortable hosting the diving because of the small field of competitors, it elected to bypass hosting swimming because of COVID-19 concerns.
“This cause a little bit of an issue as we searched throughout the entire district of facilities that would be able to host us,” District 2 swimming chairman Fred Barletta said. “There were a few schools that showed interest in it and had to know more of the details. In the end, there was only one school that met the criteria of what our needs are to run a meet of that magnitude.”
Delaware Valley was the safest site available within the district and became a better option than the nearest available facility outside the district, which would be in Carlisle.
Delaware Valley will have the pool area, high school gym, middle school gym and cafeteria available to socially distance swimmers and an upper-deck level for coaches. The entrance and exit to the pool will be expanded.
District swimming was originally scheduled for March 5-6, which were Friday and Saturday. The move to March 6-7, Saturday and Sunday, will allow Delaware Valley to keep its campus open on March 5.
The school has agreed not to schedule any other activity in its gyms that weekend.
District 2 chairman Frank Majikes said in the event of inclement weather, there is a chance the swimming could be held virtually on March 8.
Class 2A events will be held each as the early session of each day of swimming with Class 3A later in the day.
To manage the total number of people at the pool and other facets of the championships, each event will be limited to the 18 most qualified swimmers.
District 2 has moved away from the plans of holding two qualifying tournaments in each classification next weekend.
Steps will still need to be taken to reduce the field size from previous years.
All wrestling tournaments in the state are being restricted to eight wrestlers per weight class.
Instead of using two full tournaments for each class to trim the fields, District 2 will hold a single-elimination preliminary round Feb. 17 and/or 18 to get each weight class down to the eight participants for the championships, which will be Feb. 19 for Class 2A and Feb. 20 for Class 3A. For example, if there are 10 wrestlers, two bouts will be needed to eliminate two in advance and take eight to the district site.
While the swimming and diving sites were set and basketball was earlier scheduled to remain at the Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza, District 2 is still looking for somewhere to hold the individual district wrestling championships. There have been discussions and there could be a site, possibly one of the member schools, named in the days ahead.
District 2 wrestling chairman Jay Starnes said that sites could be set as early as Monday.
