When the Bull Run District released its football schedule for the 2020-21 school year earlier this week, conspicuously missing were a couple of longstanding Shenandoah County rivalry games.

Nowhere on the six-game, all-district schedule – condensed because of COVID-19 –is a Central-Strasburg matchup, since the Falcons are still a year away from moving back into the Bull Run. Neither is there a Central-Stonewall Jackson contest. Though there is a chance one of those matchups could take place at the conclusion of the truncated regular season in April. It could be the first time since Central opened its doors in 1959 that the Falcons don’t square off with the Rams, and the first time in 36 years Central and Stonewall won’t meet on the football field.

In fact, there will be a dearth of those Shenandoah County rivalry games across most sports this school year, one of the many oddities that are unveiling as high schools work on finalizing their athletic schedules within the Virginia High School League’s “Championships +1” model for conducting sports during an ongoing pandemic.

“You want to be able to provide kids with that and the community with those games,” Stonewall Athletic Director Mike Lenox said of the rivalry games against Central. “I think that’s important. It’s gonna be different, and I think that at least this year it won’t be such a big deal because kids just want to play. I think that’ll help alleviate a little bit of that because kids just want to get out there and get going.”

The progress that has been made over the last week gives student-athletes, parents, coaches and ADs more hope that high school sports will indeed take place in Virginia in 2020-21. The VHSL last week officially adopted its condensed season model that it feels gives its member schools the best chance to contest all of their sports amid a pandemic. In the days after, schools began announcing their finalized schedules.

Comparatively speaking, those schedules are odd – they’re built to represent 60% of a “normal” schedule, play opens with the winter season in December, followed by the start of the traditional fall sports in February and the spring season in late April, and football games will take place on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays – but they at least offer something to strive for.

“Whenever we started workouts (in July), that gave kids a little bit of hope, coaches a little hope at that point,” Strasburg AD Matt Hiserman said. “And now that you’re able to release schedules, that takes it to the next step where coaches, athletes, spectators, parents, everybody can start seeing there is a real chance now of these happening.”

Piecing together a condensed athletic schedule, for the most part, has been a fairly smooth process for local athletic directors. The Bull Run and Class 3 Northwestern districts have each already pretty much finalized schedules for their team sports and are working on completing sports with individual components such as wrestling, swimming, golf and indoor/outdoor track and field. Sherando AD Jason Barbe stated in an email on Thursday that the Class 4 Northwestern District had not yet officially finalized its schedules.

For the Bull Run and Class 3 Northwestern, which include eight and seven teams, respectively, the schedules for team sports essentially took care of themselves. The six-game maximum for football meant both districts could play an entire league-only regular season (Rappahannock County, the only Class 1 member of the Bull Run, is not playing a district schedule this year, Hiserman said), and contest limits in basketball (14 games), volleyball (12), baseball (12) and softball (12) required only a little extra thought.

The Bull Run, which opted to play only district games in all of its team sports, can’t play two games apiece against each team in the league in volleyball, baseball, softball and soccer (10-game limit), and chose an approach in which each team plays each other at least once, with a second game scheduled against schools within the closest proximity to each other. (Tennis follows a similar path but the Bull Run looked outside the district to flesh out the 10-game regular season, and Strasburg will play Central in both boys and girls tennis this year.)

The Class 3 Northwestern took a similar approach to basketball and soccer, though it hasn’t restricted play to only district teams in those instances.

Hiserman noted that such a scheduling format creates some imbalance – some schools will be playing two games against one opponent where others are only playing that opponent once – but added that “in this year you’re not worried about something like that.”

Scheduling has been more of a challenge in the sports with individual components. Swimming and indoor track have been hard to nail down due to lack of venues to hold events, and local ADs noted that they’re still awaiting guidance from the VHSL on the maximum number of teams that are allowed at any one event.

A few ADs said that based on the current 250-person maximum on social gatherings, they’re working under the assumption that wrestling events, for example, would be limited to four teams or fewer. In the VHSL’s adopted plan, wrestling teams are allowed eight weigh-ins rather than the usual 12, but if wrestling meets are indeed capped at a four-team maximum, wrestlers could have, at most, 24 matches under their belt before the regional tournament.

And that’s assuming schools can maximize all eight wrestling dates to be conducted as quads, something Skyline AD Bill Cupp said he’s “not 100% sure I can do that.”

“Wrestling seems to be a little bit of a snafu,” said Ed Dike, Warren County’s AD, “because the VHSL talks about doing 60%, well usually our kids have got between 40 and 50 matches by the time they get to states. Well the way it’s set up right now, they might have – might have – 20. That’s not 60%.”

VHSL Executive Director Billy Haun noted during last week’s Executive Committee meeting that he and Associate Director Tom Dolan had recently met with Gov. Ralph Northam’s office to discuss expanding the 250-person maximum for VHSL-sanctioned sports, something Haun added the governor’s office seemed receptive to further exploring.

Local ADs said they expect to get more guidance from the VHSL in the coming weeks, after which events for sports like cross country, swimming, track and wrestling could potentially be expanded. In those sports, Central-Strasburg and Central-Stonewall contests remain a possibility.

Those matchups could also happen on the football field and in other team sports if two of those three teams don’t make the playoffs. In that instance, an extra game is allowed for non-regional qualifying teams (hence the “+1” in the VHSL’s model’s name), and all three parties are interested in playing a Central-Strasburg or Central-Stonewall football game on April 9 if the opportunity presents itself.

All of this is assuming, of course, that sports are indeed allowed to happen when the time comes. Though it wasn’t mentioned during last week’s meeting when the VHSL Executive Committee approved its scheduling model, Haun had previously indicated that sports deemed high-contact risk — including basketball, football, volleyball and wrestling — couldn’t take place as long as Virginia was in Phase 3 of its reopening plan.

“Right now, the phase that we’re in, we can’t play or we would be playing,” Lenox said. “So I think things need to still progress in that aspect for us to be able to play come December.”

Hiserman said it’s his understanding that Haun and the VHSL have been working with Northam’s office to figure out how to play those high-risk sports even if the state is still in Phase 3 come December.

“Every conversation I’ve heard and been on (with) committees, the high school league wants these sports to happen and they’re trying to work with the governor’s office and those places to appease them to allow those sports to go on,” Hiserman said.