While schools will be offering all or most of their normal slate of fall sports, players, coaches, and spectators will have to follow COVID restrictions, and attendance at some games will be limited to players’ immediate family. In addition, the season will be shorter, and athletes will compete against schools they might not normally play.

“It’s been a push. Everyone is reorganizing,” Craig Kozens, Laconia High School’s athletic director said of the effort athletic directors have put in to cobble together a schedule of games and COVID-compliant precautions in just a few weeks. “It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement,” he added, noting that students have not had any organized sports to play since schools across the state were ordered closed on March 15.

“We normally have our athletic schedule set two years in advance,” said Sarah Dumais, athletic director at Inter-Lakes High School which serves students in Meredith, Center Harbor and Sandwich. “And here we are three weeks from the start of the season and we don’t have a set schedule for all sports.”

Schools are still waiting for final guidance from the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association before they can put together a schedule for football games. The start of the football season is Sept. 25, according to the NHIAA.

Soccer, field hockey, and volleyball games are due to start a week earlier, on Sept. 18. Practice in all fall sports will begin on Sept. 8, the first day of school in many area districts.

One of the priorities in this fall’s schedule was to cut down on the amount of travel that teams need to make to away games, partly because buses can now carry far fewer students because of social distancing restrictions. Another reason is to prevent students from having to travel to the southern part of the state where there are more cases of COVID-19.

The local regional cluster consists of Laconia, Gilford, Belmont, Franklin, and Plymouth high schools, Inter-Lakes High School in Meredith, Winnisquam Regional High School in Tilton, Newfound Regional High School in Bristol, Kingswood Regional High School in Wolfeboro, Moultonborough Academy, Kennett High School in Conway, and Prospect Mountain High School in Alton.

Individual schools will play against only some of the 12 schools in the cluster. Laconia High, for example, will play against just six schools: Gilford, Belmont, Franklin, Plymouth, Inter-Lakes, and Prospect Mountain. Inter-Lakes, meanwhile, will play against eight schools, possibly 10.

The shorter travel distances will make it possible for a junior varsity team to be shuttled by bus to a game site and then have the same bus return to pick up the varsity squad, Dumais explained.

Schedules have been arranged so that, in a given week, one school’s athletes, regardless of the sport, will play their games against the same opponent, to minimize the number of different players an athlete will come into contact with.

The regular season will last 5½ weeks.

Because of the cluster scheduling, schools will often be playing teams which are not in their division, a classification system in which teams play other schools of similar enrollment size. For example, Gilford High, a Division 3 school, will play three field hockey games against Laconia High, a Division 2 school.

The regular season will be followed by open tournaments, Kozens said.

Each school is setting its own home rules for safety. But in all area schools, students will be given a pre-screening for symptoms of COVID each day before participating in sports, and athletes will be required to wear face masks when not engaged in actual play. Coaches will have to wear masks at all times and will also need to limit their movements on the sidelines to ensure social distancing.

At Winnisquam Regional, players will sit on chairs spaced 6 feet apart rather than on benches, John Larsen, the school’s athletic director, explained.

For games played at Laconia High’s Bank of New Hampshire Stadium, home fans will all sit on one side of the field, with those rooting for the visiting team on the other. Social distancing will be required for both banks of spectators.

Laconia and Inter-Lakes will be limiting spectators for volleyball games to members of a player’s immediate family. Greater attendance will be allowed at volleyball games played at Gilford High, but every other row of bleacher seats will be roped off to ensure proper distancing, Athletic Director Rick Aquilano said.

Spectator restrictions for games at Belmont High are still being worked out, according to Athletic Director Cayman Belyea.

Larsen said he would be presenting a plan to Winnisquam’s Athletics Activities Council which would limit attendance at home games to parents and guardians of the athletes. The council was scheduled to act on that plan Friday. “That’s the direction we’re leaning toward,” he said Thursday.

In reaching the decision to push for a resumption of interscholastic sports, area schools have leaned heavily on direction from the NHIAA. While the organization does not decide if schools hold sports, it did unanimously approve the document which provides the guidance for what policies a school should follow in resuming sports.

The Inter-Lakes School District indicated on July 24 that there would be no sports for the fall/winter sports season, but when the NHIAA issued its Return to Play Guidance document shortly afterward, athletics were included in the district’s school reopening plan approved by the School Board on Aug. 3, Dumais said.

Athletic directors as well as other school officials have stressed that athletics — even with limitations — are an important part of a student’s school experience.

“It’s imperative that we get kids out there,” Larsen said. “Something is better than nothing.”

The directors said the precautions and special planning should give parents and the general public confidence that youngsters can play sports in a way that also safeguards their health.

“The goal isn’t just to initiate the season,” Aquilano said. “It’s to finish it too.”