Michigan’s fall high school sports season officially kicked off this week with the start of practices for football, cross country, volleyball, boys soccer, girls swimming, girls golf and boys tennis.

How those seasons end is still very much uncertain amid the COIVD-19 pandemic, but one option being discussed by the Michigan High School Athletic Association is moving those seven sports, plus Upper Peninsula girls tennis, to a schedule spanning March, April and May.

MHSAA executive director Mark Uyl called that approach “the most logical scenario right now” during Wednesday’s interview on Bill Simonson’s sports talk radio program The Huge Show, citing it as one of a half-dozen possibilities the organization is looking at to keep the fall sports season alive for the 2020-21 academic year.

Under that model, winter sports would finish their seasons by the end of February, fall sports would happen during March, April and May, followed by spring sports in May, June and July.

“I think you first start looking at your winters sports, and as much as we’d love to have wrestling culminate at Ford Field and both boys and girls basketball culminating at the Breslin Center with spectators, as we sit here right now on Wednesday, Aug. 12, I just don’t see that being in the cards,” Uyl said. “What we could do is shorten or at least move up the end of our winter season so that if all winter sports could be done by the end of February, now once you hit the first of March — and you’re making a big roll of the dice with weather — but you would then look at any of your fall sports that couldn’t get in (in the fall), and maybe that becomes a March, April into May window.

“And maybe there is a bit of a delay with our normal spring sports, but the one criticism I’ve heard for years from our spring sports coaches is, ‘We try to get started in March and April, and the weather is awful.’ It’s much easier to play a sport like football or soccer in March or April in our state than it is tennis, golf, baseball and softball.

“In the model that some other states are looking at, especially those in the upper Midwest, if things have to get moved, you’re then probably looking at a redo of the fall in March, April, May, and then your spring sports with some overlap going May, June and finshing up in July. I think that’s as accurately as I can speculate right now, but just looking at a 30,000-foot view, that would be the most logical scenario right now.”

The push for maintaining three distinct seasons comes from the MHSAA’s belief in the benefits of athletes playing multiple sports.

“It’s all interconnected because if we were just a single-sport organization, you could make some decisions and move some things without having worry about the other moving pieces to that, but we’re true believers in having multiple-sport athletes, and that’s something that if we have to get creative in the middle or back end of our school year, it’s going to be protecting those different experiences for multi-sport athletes as best as we can,” Uyl said.

Uyl didn’t go into specifics on the other options the MHSAA is considering, and another MHSAA spokesperson said the organization is still fine-tuning some of the models based on different scenarios that could result from each one.

It’s a complex and uncertain situation, but Uyl said the MHSAA is looking at every option, including holding sports in the fall, because if schools don’t offer activities, kids will find them somewhere else.

“If we’re not able to offer any programs this fall, then kids and families are going to go find activity, and the one thing I believe with all of my being is that kids are going to be safest this fall in athletics in a school-sports environment,” he said. “We’re the ones that have — in many cases — professional educators, and though we do have some lay people that aren’t educators, they’re folks who have gone through our coaching advancement program where we have the right perspective, we have the right focus that our programs at the high school level. It’s really about kids first, and it’s meeting the needs of those kids first to where there is not a financial incentive for our coaches that coach in the school space.

“There are a number of quality people that coach non-school sports — club, travel and AAU — there are a ton of quality people in those environments, but I firmly believe our kid are going to be safest with us because, one, we’ve spelled out all the return to activity procedures and protocols, and two, we have accountability; we have athletic directors who are accountable to principals and principals that are accountable to superintendents and superintendents who are accountable to their boards of education. Unfortunately in that non-school space, there isn’t that accountability; there isn’t that organization.”

Uyl also said the fact that many school districts across the state are starting the school year with online classes doesn’t necessarily mean school sports can’t happen.

In fact, many administrators welcome the idea of having school sports without in-person learning, he said.

“I know from all the mental health research that we get on almost a daily basis, kids need some thread of normalcy, and during these strange and uncertain times, if that means that the one thread is being on a school athletic team, then I think that is actually a good thing, and not a negative,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of school superintendents tell me, ‘Mark, based on the number of factors, we have to start our school year all online with virtual education, but you know what, we really think we can learn some lessons with us first bringing kids back to campus through athletics because you’ve already got small defined groups of kids by team.’

“The JV soccer players aren’t mixing with your girls golfers or with the JV boys tennis team or with the freshman football kids. You have the same group of students back on campus together every day with the same adults in charge, and now if you do have a positive case, it’s much easier to trace and do what you have to do based on the health department guidelines than if you had literally a hundred kids in a typical-sized high school all in the hallways together during the school day.

“I’m hearing from more and more districts that this is a safe way to get kids back to activity, a safe way to really address some mental health issues by giving them one norm in their life, and the other thing is our most at-risk kids are now going to be asked to start a school year completely virtually. We’re going to lose those kids, and if we can give them one structured activity right now, and if that’s a fall athletic team that’s going to help especially our kids who are most at risk, I’m all in.

“The fact of the matter is those from the affluent communities are going to be able to afford the support they need for their kids to do online education during the day, and then they’re going to have the means to go find a non-school sport in the evenings and on the weekends. It’s those kids from our most at-risk places, and I’m telling you what, if no face-to-face school means no face-to-face sports in some of these districts, I think we’re really short-changing a lot of kids, especially those that need our programs the most.”

Uyl also said the recent decisions from college football conferences to cancel or postpone fall sports isn’t something that forces the MHSAA’s hand.

Rather, the local nature of high school athletics make them better positioned to exist without spreading COVID-19.

“At the high school level, things are incredibly local. Nothing happens at the collegiate level that can be characterized as local,” Uyl said. “Even if you’re going to have a conference-only schedule, in the Big Ten, you’re going all the way from New Jersey, with Rutgers, all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska and every place in between.

“At our level, you really have kids in their own communities, and if we’re going to be able to compete with that local flavor of not having to travel 100-some-odd people on planes or in busses or in hotels and all the logistical things that come with moving a team.

“Certainly, we’re looking at what the colleges are doing, but we’ll continue to take things slowly. We’re taking things right now literally on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.”

The MHSAA set a date of Thursday, Aug. 20 for its decision on fall sports, and while the organization is expecting to get some clarification from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on the use of indoor facilities before then, Uyl said Aug. 20 is still the target date.

“We do believe clarification and more guidance about opening of indoor facilities should be coming very, very soon because obviously our government leadership needs to do something here shortly with school facilities because we have some schools that are actually opening for classes and kids the week of August 17th,” he said.

Uyl said the two main groups his organization is talking with on the medical side of things are the MHSAA’s sports medicine advisory committee and Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, which provides date on the state’s percentage of positive tests — which Uyl called a key metric.

“Ideally, they would love that number to be below 3 percent,” he said. “We understand that that is a key metric they look at. Statewide, that number hovers right now about 3.1 to anywhere from a 3.3. There are parts of the state where it’s below 3 and there are other parts where that’s a little bit higher. Certainly, the daily cases are part of that metric, and then certainly hospitalizations and deaths, and thankfully both numbers continue to trend in a positive direction overall.”

While that data will play a main factor in the decision, Uyl said he’s also interested in hearing how the first week of organized practice went for high school teams.

“I want to see the data and how the trends are going. As much as I love what’s going on in other states and at other levels, I want to see how this first week with football kids in helmets has gone,” he said. “I want to hear about how those first few days of practice are going, then we’ll look at what next week brings and again leading up to that decision on the 20th.”

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