The Virginia High School League’s Executive Committee is scheduled to meet to discuss fall sports this morning, and though a final decision on whether or not to hold a fall season during the COVID-19 pandemic likely won’t be made, local athletic directors and coaches are hoping the meeting at least produces details that at this point have been scarce.

“Right now everything’s kind of just open-ended, so we don’t really have any information,” Skyline Athletic Director Bill Cupp said on Tuesday. “At some level, just any kind of information will be great, that way we can start making plans one way or the other.”

Cupp further expressed that the “biggest frustration” felt by ADs, coaches, student-athletes and parents is that no one seems to know “where we’re going” in terms of the fall sports season.

While it’s a fair assumption that the fall season, if it does happen, won’t begin as scheduled, that issue has yet to be formally addressed by the VHSL. As it stood heading into today’s meeting, the VHSL’s regular timeline for fall sports remained intact, and it lists July 30 as the start date for football and golf, with the remaining fall sports – cross country, volleyball, field hockey and competition and sideline cheer – set to begin on Aug. 3.

The consensus among athletic directors and coaches interviewed for this story is the original start date, which is now just over two weeks away, won’t hold up, particularly for sports like football where physical contact is unavoidable.

In an email on Monday morning, Mike McCall, the VHSL’s director of communications, stated that while he wouldn’t rule out a final decision being made on fall sports, today’s meeting will be more about “discussing where we are right now with what we know.” He noted that Phase 3 of Virginia’s reopening plan doesn’t allow for contact sports and that it’s unclear what restrictions look like beyond Phase 3. McCall added that “the sentiment is not to cancel fall sports.”

“Options will be discussed but as of now, there won’t be a decision made about fall sports,” McCall wrote, “and that’s a good thing because Phase (3) is not friendly to playing contact sports.”

On a similar note, Cupp and Central Athletic Director Justin Broughman both cautioned against a final decision being made at this point, as any such decision made today likely wouldn’t be the one desired by those who want to see fall sports take place.

Cupp said it would be “terrible” for the VHSL to make a decision today to cancel fall sports only to realize in September that holding competition would’ve been feasible.

“That would be even worse than what we’re dealing with now,” he said.

That doesn’t mean Cupp and others are satisfied remaining in limbo. While an advocate of a “wait-and-see,” incremental approach to addressing the fall season, Broughman said the VHSL needs to start laying out plans for what a sports season for 2020-21 could look like.

“I’ve heard the condensed season model and I’ve heard of punting everything until the winter time and playing fall sports in the spring. … I feel like we’ve got to have an answer,” Broughman said on Monday.

“I hope that they give us a little bit of something to work with, not just leaving it up in the air. But it does cause me a little bit of concern that all these school divisions are sort of making their own path through this and sort of designing their own return to school and it seems like a lot of people are pretty far apart in what they’re doing.”

Central football coach Mike Yew said on Monday evening that he doesn’t care if today’s meeting comes and goes without an official decision on whether or not to outright cancel fall sports but someone needs to present some sort of plan.

“I just want someone to say, ‘By God, this is what we’re doing,’ instead of us continuing to say ‘we’re waiting on more information, we’re waiting on this, we’re not really sure where this is going, we’ve got to wait and see what phase we’re in.’ All of that is just window dressing, in my opinion,” said Yew, who mentioned a scenario floating around in which fall sports would take place in February and March, in between the winter and spring sports seasons. “Just make a decision, and the reality is this: make a decision and say we’re not doing football right now, and if that’s the case, that’s fine. (Say) ‘We’re gonna go winter, fall, spring, this is the timeline,’ and if we get to November and it still can’t happen, then you can cancel it.”

Asked how confident he is that sports will take place at some point this fall, Broughman said his level of optimism varies day to day. Cupp, when asked that same question, said it’s “50-50 at best, unfortunately.”

Cupp noted that even if it’s determined that fall sports would take place and what that season would look like structurally, a deeper dive brings up questions regarding the protocol and ramifications if a student-athlete tests positive for COVID-19, what happens if teams have to cancel games because of a positive test and what the playoff structure looks like.

“There’s just tons of questions that have to be answered but we can’t answer them,” Cupp said. “These are the 25th step and we haven’t taken, really, the first and second steps yet.”