By: Nicholas Williams
THE ROUNDUP
The Arizona Interscholastic Association has loosened its COVID-19 restrictions multiple times since the beginning of the year.
However, at the moment, it doesn’t seem like it will be enough as Brophy basketball, wrestling and soccer have all been delayed.
The AIA uses cases per 100,000 in the county to determine whether or not schools are allowed to play sports.
This metric only pertains to starting the season. If your county is under this number, you are permitted to start.
Once teams have started, they are permitted to finish out the season, given that there aren’t any major outbreaks in COVID-19, which is definitely not out of the realm of possibilities.
The most recent data was updated on November 12, which is now atof 129 positive cases out of 100,000 in Maricopa County, the highest since the start of the school year in August.
This exceeds the current AIA requirements of 100 cases per 100,000.
To start the school year, the AIA gave a restriction of 10 cases out of a population of 100,000 in order to start sports.
Since the start of Brophy’s football season, the numbers for Maricopa County have increasingly gone above that standard.
The AIA’s response to this was just to raise the standard. It then went to 75 per 100,000, and once we were beyond that, it moved to 100 per 100,000.
On Nov. 5, the number was 115 per 100,000, which is what first sparked the AIA delaying winter sports.
“Winter sports this year are going to be a challenge,” said Brophy athletic director Mr. Joshua Garcia ’07.
Garcia expressed the two possible options to get winter sports up and going.
He said that either the number of COVID cases would have to reduce drastically, or that there would need to be an adjustment to the metrics that the AIA has provided for starting the season.
The current numbers are always posted on Arizona’s Department of Health Services every Thursday. However, there is a two week delay in numbers.
As a result, the 129 mark that Maricopa County is currently at is from the week of Oct. 25, which is before Halloween.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,CDC, has expressed concerns of Halloween possibly being a super spreaker of COVID-19
In an interview with Azcentral, the AIA Executive Director David Hines said, “We post county numbers. The schools can determine when they are allowed to start practice. Competition is another issue.”
