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The Maine Principals’ Association’s Sports Medicine Committee recommended on Wednesday that the fall season move forward for all high school sports, including football and soccer.
The Sports Committee voted unanimously (12-0) on each sport, recommending that they be allowed to be played under safety guidelines established by each sport’s individual committees.
The panel’s recommendations will be voted on Thursday afternoon when the MPA’s Interscholastic Management Committee meets to decide the fate of high school sports in Maine this fall. Those sports include golf, cross-country, field hockey, soccer, football and volleyball.
Even then, local districts will have the final say on whether a high school competes in interscholastic athletics this fall during the pandemic. Already, Camden Hills has opted not to play this fall.
“The Management Committee makes the final decision to support these recommendations,” said Mike Burnham, the executive director of the MPA. “The final decision on whether or not these activities move forward are made at the local level.”
The MPA’s Sports Medicine Committee had a lengthy executive session to discuss recommendations set forth by each fall sport’s committee. Before going into that executive session, Dr. William Heinz, the head of the MPA’s Sports Medicine Committee, said that the panel was classifying soccer as a “moderate risk” sport and not a high risk sport.
That left football as the only high risk sport on the table.
Heinz said the fact that other states, with higher COVID-19 infection rates than Maine, are playing football played a part in the decision.
“It’s important that we continue to look across the country at states that have opened up football already and haven’t shown any increase in transmission of the COVID illness,” said Heinz. “(That) was one of the big reasons that we based our decision saying it was okay to go ahead with football.
“But we are going to watch that on a very close basis and if things change we have to change our recommendation.”
This story will be updated.
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