As the Anne Arundel County private school boys basketball teams at St. Mary’s and Indian Creek went through their motions during pregame warmups on Monday, there was a gentle reminder from the officials.
It wasn’t about sportsmanship or what fouls they might be enforcing more strictly, but rather about the face masks both teams were required to wear during play. Please make sure they cover your mouth and nose, the referees said to the teenagers.
The teams arrived at “Eagle Dome” in Crownsville game-ready, as locker room use is prohibited, and left dressed the same. And from start to finish, masks covered their faces — everyone’s faces.
“The hardest part is it’s hard to get high school kids to communicate anyway sometimes. So, when you put that little barrier up … ” Saints boys basketball coach Trey Quinn said, trailing into a new thought. “But we’re just so thankful to be playing. Whatever it takes, we’ll wear the mask. It’s the constant reminders of pull it up, pull it up. But we don’t think about it that much. We’re just thankful to play.”
Up and down the court, the student-athletes fiddled with the cloth covering their mouth and nose. When they would slip, a referee was there to remind them.
Pull the mask up!
“It’s been hard,” Eagles coach Marcus Johnson said, “but the guys enjoy being able to play, compete. It’s difficult ’cause you’re trying to yell through the mask. … The game moves at a different pace. It’s just a little different.”
Both St. Mary’s and Indian Creek are members of the Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association and Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland, which oversee the boys and girls private school athletics at about 30 schools in the region. Both leagues have required student-athletes to wear masks during competition for its current winter sports season, all of which take place indoors. The effort is easier said than done.
Roughly a year after the coronavirus pandemic started shutting down athletics around the country, studies are now beginning to shed light on exactly how the virus spreads.
The United States was averaging a little more than 40,000 coronavirus cases per day in late August when 81 people attended a high-intensity, in-person fitness class at a Chicago gym over a one-week period.
Coronavirus prevention measures were in place — capacity was limited to 25%, or about 10-15 people at a time, masks were required when they entered the gym, temperatures were taken, individuals were screened for symptoms and participants were stationed 6 feet apart. Once they started exercising, however, participants were allowed to remove their masks.
According to a Centers for Disease Control study published last Wednesday, among the attendees were 22 people who had gone to class on the day of, or the day before, they developed their first symptom of illness. Researchers found that 43 who tested positive went to class when they were possibly infectious with COVID-19.
More than three-fourths of attendees wore masks infrequently, the study said, and of the 81 attendees, COVID-19 cases were found among 55 of them.
As a result of the study, the CDC is urging gym-goers to wear masks while they work out and to remain 6 feet apart.
“It’s not surprising to me that vigorous exercise would cause an increase in the chance you might spread COVID around if you are sick. It doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Sell has been studying pandemic preparedness and response for the past 11 years. She has provided input on research around the reopening of schools and advised the design of safe sports bubbles, among other things.
‘It’s hard to breathe’
The wearing of masks during athletic competition has been a contentious topic throughout Maryland’s high schools, especially among those in the MIAA and IAAM.
During the winter sports season in Carroll County, masks were not required during games or wrestling matches for those competing but were for coaches and athletes on the sidelines.
The reaction to mandated masks from private school athletes has been mixed for a variety of reasons.
“I don’t like it. I can’t really breathe,” Spalding boys basketball player CJ Scott said. “It’s hard to breathe.”
Josh Chambers, who plays basketball for Indian Creek, says he gets gassed sometimes during hard practices and will occasionally step away to remove his mask.
“Sometimes I’ll walk away so that I can like, get my little air,” he said.
MIAA executive director Lee Dove said the league relied on the COVID “metrics, health guidance from many official sources and the perspective of medically associated personnel and administrators” before it implements any actions. But with the winter season being solely indoor activities, the MIAA “felt best to take the precautions deemed necessary to provide a safe experience for our athletes, coaches and officials,” and it was accepted by the executive committee, member athletic directors and administrators.
“Even the sport officials’ groups committed to wearing masks for indoor activities,” Dove added.
Sue Thompson, executive director of the IAAM, said all 30 of the league’s athletic directors agreed that masks would be worn on and off the court during the winter season.
“We are doing what we need to do to provide student-athletes with opportunities of a lifetime,” she noted.
There were several discussions about wearing masks during competition in Carroll County, Supervisor of Athletics Michael Duffy said, but the school system ultimately decided not to make it a requirement. Carroll was the only county in the state to play a full winter season from early December until mid-February.
“We made a calculated decision that we felt kids were going to breathe easier without a mask and decided to forgo masks during when they were involved in strenuous activities,” Duffy said. “I don’t think that it was a right or wrong decision, but I haven’t seen data that has said we had mass outbreaks during competitions, from player to player. We have not seen evidence of that, so I think we made the correct decision to benefit our students and get them back into competition.”
Dove said a mask policy has not been implemented yet for the spring season, which will begin competitions this month. Thompson said it will be up to each school to make that determination, but for indoor sports like badminton, masks will continue to be worn on the court. All sideline personnel will wear masks, they said.
The fall sports season begins Friday in Howard County. Masks will not be required during competitions, although the league’s volleyball coaches collectively agreed to have all players wear them.
And, at least one outdoor coach is requiring her players to keep masks on at all times.
“We have been very strict about masks so far. Everyone wears them at all times, even during scrimmaging and conditioning,” Atholton field hockey coach Martie Dyer said. “We’re fortunate to be getting this chance to play again, so I just don’t want to take any chances.”
Anne Arundel County Public Schools is aligning with county guidance, which also falls in line with Howard County.
In total, 20 states mandated that masks be worn during competition for winter sports, according to the National Federation of High Schools, while 14 — including Maryland’s public schools — did not make it a requirement.
‘It just makes no sense’
Dennis Lynch is an administrator for the Facebook group “Parents for MIAA and IAAM Athletes,” which has grown to nearly 3,000 members since September. The group was created to bring parents together and collectively push the IAAM and MIAA to reopen and have a fall sports season in 2020.
The talk of the group lately has centered on masks.
“We can understand, to some extent, why the masks are required indoors, although it still goes against what the World Health Organization and CDC recommends,” said Lynch, whose son Liam is a freshman lacrosse player at Archbishop Spalding in Severn. Spring sports teams have been practicing for several weeks.
Lynch’s issue lies with the wearing of masks for outdoor sports. The MIAA and IAAM did not require athletes to wear masks during its truncated fall sports season in November, and while the MIAA has not announced its policy for spring sports, some schools have taken the decision into their own hands.
At Spalding, masks are required to be worn at all times — including during competitions for outdoor sports, athletic director Jeff Parsons said.
“If you are on our campus, you’re wearing a mask, regardless of what you’re doing,” Parsons said. “And if you are representing Spalding, you’re wearing a mask, regardless of what you’re doing because we felt that it was the safest thing to do to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.”
Lynch said that wasn’t always the case, though Parsons said the mask policy has not changed and coaches have been sending constant reminders.
“It’s interesting because it was being enforced for them going to and from the field but once they were on the field and they had helmets on for lacrosse or they were practicing for girls lacrosse, then they weren’t being as strict for them,” Lynch said. “Now all of a sudden starting Monday, every phase of them working out, them on the field, scrimmaging, et cetera, they are requiring masks.”
He said since Friday several schools have implemented mask protocols that call for their use during competition.
“It just makes no sense. Throughout the country, kids have been playing since the end of last summer and have been playing sports in tournaments, in club play, in different counties and states, and they haven’t documented that there’s a major transmission through the limited contact that they have through sports,” Lynch said. ” … There’s no evidence that says these kids are transmitting the virus on the field.”
‘I think it does make a difference’
For Sell, at this point in the pandemic it’s all about levels of risk. Two masks are better than one. An N95 mask is better than a surgical mask. Going to the grocery store early or late in the day when it’s emptier is less risky than going when it’s crowded.
So, in her eyes, wearing a mask despite athletes bumping elbows for two hours could be a factor in whether the virus spreads from person to person.
“I think it does make a difference. Can you reduce your level of risk by putting some of this mitigation in place?” Sell said. “So, I think it does make a difference to reduce some of the spread of those respiratory droplets and that type of thing.”
Sell went as far to say that any close-contact sports indoors should not be played for at least several more months, especially with no regular testing like they have with professional sports leagues.
As a professional athlete who swam for the US National Team for eight years and won a silver medal at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Sell said a common training exercise involved swimming with a snorkel that had been taped and punctured with a hole the size of a pencil, making it harder to breathe. Could a mask act in the same way, or could wearing a mask during competition be dangerous?
“From an athlete’s perspective, it’s much harder to do what you need to do in that case. But, was it dangerous? To me, I don’t think so,” she said, noting she is not a physician and might not be qualified to answer that question.
As for outdoor sports, Sell said it makes sense that they could be played without masks as long as the use of locker rooms, weight rooms, training rooms and other gathering areas remain off limits.
The World Health Organization on Dec. 1 advised people should not wear masks during vigorous or intense physical activity because masks might reduce the ability to breathe comfortably.
But as for those who say wearing a mask poses safety concerns that might cause harm, Sell said she has not seen anything to support that.
“I think we’re balancing different sort of health risks and right now there’s still pretty high rates of COVID-19, even though we’ve seen an incredible decrease in numbers of cases since January,” she said.
Maryland reported 468 new infections Tuesday, the first day with fewer than 500 new cases since Oct. 21 and the fewest since Oct. 6. The state’s seven-day testing positivity rate stood at 3.35% Tuesday and is at its lowest point since late October, while 14.5% of the state’s 6 million-plus residents are at least partially vaccinated. About 8% are fully vaccinated.
‘Why are we suddenly changing?’
NFHS last month revised its May 2020 guidance and eliminated the tiered “Potential Infection Risk by Sport” that put sports in high-, medium- and low-risk categories. Now, the NFHS Sports Medicine Advisory Committee suggests decision-makers consider five factors in assessing the potential for COVID-19 transmission in high school sports.
“Two of those factors are that prevailing community infection rates appear to be the strongest predictor for high school athletes being infected, and proven cases of direct COVID-19 transmission during athletics remain relatively rare,” NFHS wrote in a news release on Feb. 2.
It also says participants in non-contact sports show lower rates of infection than those in contact sports, that participants in outdoor sports show lower rates of infection than indoor sports, and that the use of masks for indoor sports showed similar transmission rates than those seen in outdoor sports.
However, the committee also noted “social distancing, use of masks, staying home when ill and proper hygiene must continue to be emphasized in the locker room, on the field and court, while traveling and interacting in the community.”
NFHS also makes the case the majority of sports-related spread of COVID-19 appears to occur from social contact, not during sports participation.
“We’re just trying to be reasonable and say, OK, indoor is one thing. We’re not arguing that fact,” Lynch said. “But as a group the people overwhelmingly want their children while outside not to have to wear masks. … I personally have never pushed not wearing a mask indoors. My push is while we’re outside, why are we suddenly changing, why have the schools suddenly, and it seems collectively, decided that it’s now time to wear masks on the field?”
Katherine Fominykh and Brent Kennedy contributed this article.
