The schedule laid out by the CIF and North Coast Section calls for an abbreviated fall season composed of seven sports spanning from December potentially into April and a spring season with 12 sports jam packed from February potentially to late June. The fall season includes football, cross country and volleyball, traditionally played during the fall, while the spring season will include winter and fall sports like soccer and basketball, along with baseball, softball, track and field and swimming, among others.

While every school will have athletes who need to make difficult decisions, especially in the spring, about what sports they want to play this year, those decisions have potentially drastic consequences for schools with smaller student bodies like Calistoga and St. Helena High, both local public high schools with enrollments of fewer than 500 students that rely more on multi-sport athletes to build complete teams.

Even months out from competition, athletic directors at both schools are already worried about not being able to field teams for certain sports.

“I was hoping for three seasons, maybe start a little early so we’d be able to have three different seasons,” said St. Helena High Athletic Director Tom Hoppe, “because for small schools, it’s just going to wipe out a bunch of sports for us. They piled them so close together.”

While St. Helena and Calistoga have not yet had to make the difficult choice of outright cutting a sports program, other schools in the Coastal Mountain Conference, the 26-school athletic conference composed of the teams that make up the North Central Leagues, already have.