Safety Rules! Governor Cuomo Approves High School Sports

Safety+Rules%21+Governor+Cuomo+Approves+High+School+Sports

Governor Cuomo has given the green light to high-risk High School Sports! Cuomo has left the final decision up to local health departments and superintendents.

Basketball, ice hockey, and competitive cheerleading all started February 4th for the Fall I season. Football and volleyball will start March 1 for the Fall II season.

Putnam County along with Brewster Schools is allowing us to play high-risk sports. There will be some obvious changes, yet it is still exciting to have sports again. The county and state are taking health matters very seriously and will not be cutting any corners.

The Brewster Athletic Department has come out with a very detailed plan which highlights all of the criteria that needs to be met for each sport. While reading the plans, it is clear the amount of hard work that everyone involved put forth. Brewster athletes are very happy to see that as a school district we were able to come together on a plan that keeps everyone safe.

Many questions have arisen about the upcoming season though. Will the athletes be ready? Is there enough time to prepare for the upcoming season?

These are questions that will be answered in time. From personal experiences, I do feel that everyone will be prepared physically to go when the season starts. Mentally is where teams will struggle. The inability to practice and game plan will be very hard as most of the athletic teams traditionally have months to prepare before the season. Huge obstacles will be faced to have teams ready to play with just a couple of weeks of preparation. Much will change in the sense that teams will most likely not be able to implement a full playbook: everything will be simplified. While most teams will have returning players to lead the way, there will be new players that don’t know the way things work. Older players will be counted on heavily this season to help the coaching staff. Every team will be starting at the same disadvantage, so it will be very interesting to see teams overcome adversity.

Additionally, scheduling will be completely different. We will not be playing most of the “traditional” teams. We will still play teams within the section, but most of the games will be close in proximity. As many look to the negative of this, it could be a good chance to play teams that we don’t usually get to see. Also, the coaches are working hard to get us practicing in-person.

In my last article, I speculated as to what the football season was going to look like. Many of my questions have been answered in the past couple of weeks. Over the past couple of weeks, the team has been running Google Meet calls twice a week in preparation for the season. The team will be split for in-person workouts by position. Very similar to our cohort schedule, we will be meeting in these groups to work out. However, having fans at the games is still up in the air, but we all hope that maybe by March there will be fans. Finally, everyone can take a deep breath and get rid of all the uncertainty!

As a senior, it is awesome to hear this news. This is just the news we were all looking for in the home stretch of high school. As of right now, we can all be excited for the upcoming season, and we all hope that those plans hold. We thank all those involved who worked so hard to make this sports season happen.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York gives one of his many famous press briefings.
Brewster athletes are very grateful for their Athletic Director Dean Berardo, who has had to maneuver through many unforeseen obstacles this past athletic year.