COVID-19 might be the biggest opponent Northern teams face – Santa Fe New Mexican

Get ready for the most surreal district basketball season youll ever experience.

Its not the games, the matchups or the atmosphere that will keep Northern New Mexicans up at night with excitement this winter. No, we will be spending the next four weeks waiting to see what teams will actually get to play.

There is a sense of inevitability around Northern New Mexico that every single boys and girls basketball team will hit the pause button as they deal with a COVID-19 outbreak within their respective programs.

Programs at Santa Fe Indian School and Los Alamos have already postponed the start of their district seasons as they continue with remote learning amid the surge of cases that hit the state at the start of this month. West Las Vegas is on alert as its programs are going through COVID-19 cases.

Its merely a matter of time before it hits elsewhere.

That has athletic directors scrambling to find convenient openings in their schedules to place these makeup games. Sadly, its a futile attempt, because as one team gets through an outbreak, another will begin their temporary shutdown and upset those well-intentioned plans.

The result will be a mad dash of three or four games a week that will begin just as the calendar hits February.

If there is anything that will make coaches angry, its taking away practice time or recovery time for players.

What will make this even more frustrating is that some players will still have lingering effects from their bouts with the coronavirus, and it could take a couple of weeks before they feel somewhat normal.

If the outbreak continues into February, we will see how the New Mexico Activities Association will handle the crises stemming from this. While the organization passed a bylaw indicating no contests lost because of a COVID-19 outbreak will be counted as forfeits, it also has a rule in which district teams must play each other once to qualify for the postseason.

However, we already saw this play out in the fall, when Albuquerque Sandia reached the playoffs despite losing a district game to an outbreak.

One option that districts might have to consider is eliminating district tournaments. That action would ease the imminent scheduling squeeze and allow teams to make up games and settle district outcomes.

Dont be surprised if the vast majority of teams fail to complete their allotted district games, much less nondistrict games that were lost earlier this month. That will make district placements, which are crucial to seeding for the state tournament, all the more confusing and frustrating.

Any talk about pausing the winter sports season is moot, because there is a schedule to keep and the trains must keep running, even if they dont reach their destination at the prescribed time.

All we can do is hop the next train and hold on tight.

Its going to be a bumpy ride.

The rest is here:

COVID-19 might be the biggest opponent Northern teams face - Santa Fe New Mexican