“I am super appreciative and feel fortunate that we do have these four teams that are willing to spend hours and hours and a lot of time to come up with a way that we can do it safely,” Copenhagen girls soccer coach Charity Smykla said. “It wasn’t something that they thought about overnight, they were spending hours coming up with how we were going to make this safe, and how we’re going to be on the same page and how we’re going to give kids opportunity while following guidelines.”

Section 10, on the other hand, will see almost complete involvement in athletics with the exception of Potsdam and Massena. Section 10 schools will begin their low- and moderate-risk sports this week except for swimming and diving, which was been pushed back to the spring.

For students, being able to play interscholastic sports offers a sense of normalcy — even if that normalcy comes in abnormal circumstances.

New York State has required schools to take heavy measures to ensure that reopening buildings for in-person learning does not lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases. To successfully perform athletics, school districts will try to move many of its in school precautions to the field of play, beginning Monday.

“It’s definitely odder than anything we’ve been through before,” said Parishville-Hopkinton girls soccer coach Evan Harper, who is entering his 41st season as coach. “It’s tough on everybody. Other than wearing masks, we’re still going to do as much soccer stuff as we can.”

For many players, the strange-looking practice sessions and the limited games will be welcomed because they simply get to participate on the field again.

“We get caught up sometimes in sports and championships and everything else, but a huge part of what we do here is providing some social outlets for kids,” Lowville boys soccer coach Nick Matuszczak said. “At Lowville, we have kids coming to school only a part of the time and they still don’t get to see their friends all the time, so it’s a nice chance for them to get out, be active, which has been severely lacking for the past several months, and hopefully compete a little bit.”

Here is how the first day of practice, and the next two weeks of practice will look, for participating teams:

Precautions will become apparent Monday afternoon when athletes make their way to practice and realize that a few teammates are missing.

With the exception of Copenhagen, which is conducting full in-person learning, all Frontier League schools participating in sports are conducting some form of hybrid learning in which not every student is in class on every single day. To avoid mixing what schools are calling “cohorts,” or separate groups of students, only students physically in class will be able to participate in practice that day.

“Since we’re in the hybrid model (at school), we’re going to have kids either practice Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday for the first two weeks, and then sort of reassess things,” Matuszczak said. “And if things are going well, I think then we’re going to try to move into five-day-a-week practice, as long as we can make sure that everyone has equal access to transportation to make their way to practices and to participate fully.”

For Beaver River, members of the team’s green cohort will participate in practices on Monday and Tuesday. On Thursday and Friday, the orange cohort will practice. On Wednesday, a day when Beaver River doesn’t have students in school, each team will hold two separate practices, one for each cohort. The practices will last for an hour to an hour and a half and be separated by 15 minutes.

“We’re going to do that for two weeks,” Beaver River athletic director Wanda Joslin said. “And then on October 3rd, we can combine our cohorts as long as everything goes well, up to that point.”

Coaches at Beaver River, Lowville and South Lewis will have to adapt to the split squad approach to practice for the first couple of weeks. Joslin is coaching the girls junior varsity team and said that she has 17 girls in the green cohort and only eight in the orange cohort. Coaches will essentially go through the same practice twice while their team is split. Joslin said she plans to focus on conditioning work for much of the first few weeks.

“We’re going to do two like sessions because we want every kid to get the same information,” Joslin said. “It’s going to be hard starting off, but at least we have something. We’re going to be creative, obviously, we have to be, but a lot of the first couple of weeks anyway will be conditioning and individual skill work.”

With smaller groups per day, Beaver River is planning to hold boys and girls soccer practice at the same time but on separate ends of the school’s turf field. One of the teams can move off to the adjacent grass if the other wants a full field practice.

“Our focus, especially for the first two weeks is with the social distancing, that’s why we’re going to break into groups and we’re only going to have half of the team there at a time, is conditioning and just skill work,” Matuszczak said.

Lowville girls tennis coach Jim Rhodes said that his sport can pull off social distancing fairly easily. The net naturally keeps players apart and the players don’t often come into contact with each other.

“Tennis is probably the easiest sport to social distance,” Rhodes said. “Players never are actually in contact with each other.”

In Section 10, Malone boys cross country coach Matt Tessier expects the first day of practice to focus mostly on social distancing practices.

“We’ll be doing a lot of instructing on how to stay 12 feet apart and using hand sanitizer before practice,” Tessier said. “We have to check everybody’s temperature before practice begins. We’ll have to go over routines and I’ll get kids on the track and position everyone six to 12 feet apart and do a run where they stay 12 feet apart. A lot of it will be training how to behave during a run.”

Tessier’s team begins practice Wednesday and he’s already thinking about staggering practice runs to keep athletes apart.

“We have to maintain distance, which is tough. We have to stay 12 feet apart,” he said. “If I have my kids doing a speedwork session, where they normally line up together, if they start two or three seconds from each other, they’ll be far apart enough, but it will be hard to keep track of times.”

Gouverneur girls soccer coach Mark Martin said he’s still waiting on some of the training guidelines and is curious how they will work in a sport like soccer.

“Some of the (drills) where they are right on top of each other, trying to beat a defender one-on-one (may change),” Martin said. “Some of my drills are inside social distance (guidelines). It will be interesting to see how they want us to go on that. There is still physical touching in soccer, players still bump. It will be interesting how they want me to tweak the training sessions.”

MASK WEARING/EQUIPMENT SHARING

Whether they’re in practice or playing a game, when teams are on the field they will be able to operate as usual but will follow all of the state guidance regarding masks.

“Whatever is mandatory for games is mandatory for practices,” Harper said. “We’ll be wearing masks at all times and social distancing on the bench.”

Players in all sports, except for swimming, will be required to wear masks when social distancing isn’t possible. This means soccer teams will have them on when practicing and playing games and cross country runners will have them on when in a crowd of runners.

“We are doing everything that we would normally do during the school day, we are carrying that over into athletics,” Joslin said. “So masks at all times, we will give mask breaks. But we expect the students to keep their masks on. I’m looking at the gaiter ones that they can quickly pull up and down.”

Joslin said she is asking that the booster club to supply masks for all of the fall athletes. Harper said Section 10 is providing masks designed for playing sports.

Masks will become everyday equipment for student athletes. Beaver River also will be requiring each athlete to use their own soccer ball and will supply a ball to a student who doesn’t have one. The school will supply each student with two pinnies that they would have to take home and wash.

Rhodes will have his players take a few extra precautions to prevent contact with the tennis ball. There’s a chance that more balls will be used in a bid to limit as much contact as possible.

“We’ll try to have the kids kick, or pick up balls with the foot and racket, so the only time (they’re) touching the balls with hands is on serves,” Rhodes said.

South Lewis cross country coach Jack Bernard said the final details are still being ironed out for the team’s first practice, which is slated for Wednesday. “The final requirements for masks are to be determined,” Benard said. “It’s still up in the air.”

A large point of concern is how teams will manage transportation. Beaver River is requiring parents or players to supply their own transportation after practice.

“Right now, it’s going to depend on the parents for transportation, bringing and taking kids,” Joslin said.

In an email, Lowville superintendent Rebecca Dunckel-King said “If students at the varsity level do not have equitable access to the program because of transportation, we will either find them transportation, or rethink the program as a whole.”

As long as there are no snags in the first two weeks of practice, the Frontier League is expected to start its season around Columbus Day weekend. The slate of teams will consist of one “B” Division squad (Lowville), two “C” Division teams (South Lewis and Beaver River) and one “D” Division team (Copenhagen). For superintendent and Frontier League assistant directory Scott Connell, Copenhagen playing up in all games is not a large concern. “If we’re competing for a league championship, you probably don’t want to play a B school,” Connell said. “But Lowville is a small B, so we’re not really concerned about that. We’re going to be pretty good, both boys and girls. We have a lot of returning kids, so I think those games will be competitive, I don’t know if we can win them. But I think more importantly, if we can be competitive in all of them, we’re going to be happy and our kids are going to be very happy.”

South Lewis and Beaver River are the only two Frontier League teams competing this fall that have cross country. Bernard said each team will host a meet against each other, with one in Turin and another in Beaver Falls.

“It’s all for the seniors,” Bernard said. “At least there’s something for them to do.”

Simply competing is all that teams that are playing this fall can hope to achieve.

“It’s important to get them some kind of soccer, that’s better than nothing,” said Martin, who ran a club team in Gouverneur that played 30 games over the summer. “I’d like to see the kids playing games than just not doing anything. It’s going to be a challenge for them and everybody. We’ll all be back on that even playing field.”

Sportswriters Cap Carey, Chris Fitz Gerald, Dan Mount and Alain St. Pierre contributed to this story.