Coaches talked to their teams Wednesday afternoon – their last day of in-person practices – to share the news with their players and the plan of holding remote practices and how that will work.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker released an updated map of COVID-19 hot spots on Wednesday night. Among the cities and towns shaded red in the state was Marlborough.

This comes after two Marlborough High students tested positive for coronavirus, although neither student attended the first day of in-person school on Monday.

As a result, practices at Marlborough High will now be remote until students are allowed to be back at school in person.

“Our season is not canceled by any means,” Marlborough athletic director Jeff Rudzinsky said. “Our superintendent, as he told me, has every intention to get kids back in school so we are just being safe, which I’m glad. The safety part of our school is most important.”

Coaches talked to their teams Wednesday afternoon – their last day of in-person practices – to share the news with their players and the plan of holding remote practices and how that will work.

“My plan is to just keep everyone engaged and conditioned,” new Marlborough field hockey coach Mel Melkonian said. “I told the girls at our last in-person practice that it takes two weeks to get into shape, but just two days to get out of shape.”

In the meantime, the remote practices for Melkonian will be mostly conditioning to help prepare them for the 7 vs. 7 games.

Of course, there will be hosts of challenges as a result of doing remote practices.

“I’m really relying on them to push themselves” Melkonian said. “There is only so much you can do when you are not on a field so we will have to get creative in terms of using light posts for measurements for doing sprints, using different markers, mailboxes whatever it is whereas if we were on a field it would be easier.”

Melkonian plans on having her players time their sprints and report their times, and has also sent everybody home with field hockey balls so they can practice stick work through Zoom.

For new Marlborough girls soccer coach Gerry Padilla, he already mapped out a rough idea of what remote practices would look like.

“We sort of had a plan in action to prepare for this,” Padilla said. “We gave the girls some activities to do (to) help keep them in shape and hopefully once we are able to get back together that we will be able to play a few games.”

As a result of Marlborough going in the red, the start of the seasons for both field hockey and soccer has been pushed back to the second week of October as opposed to the first week of that month. Those games that were postponed as a result will be made up at the end of the season.

According to AMSA athletic director Pete Jones, however, the charter school in Marlborough isn’t changing how it holds its practices quite yet.

“We are waiting to hear clarification from the Marlborough Board of Health in regards to our ability to play sports,” Jones said. “We are only running two low-risk sports this fall in golf and cross-country, so until we hear otherwise from the Board of Health, we are still going to have in-person practices for those sports.”

Jones admitted that he was unsure what it actually means for sports when a community goes into the red.

“When the color turns red, what exactly is going to happen to sports in that moment in time,” Jones said. “I’m a little unsure so I reached out to the MIAA and they told me to get clarification from our local board of health. So that is what we are going to do.”

In August, AMSA moved other sports such as soccer and volleyball to the “Fall II” season, which is set to start in February.

Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School, which is also located in Marlborough, moved all of their fall sports to the “Fall II” season.

Ethan Winter is a senior multimedia sports journalist at the Daily News. He can be reached at ewinter@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @EWints.