Fannin County High School officials are currently waiting for further guidance from the Georgia High School Association (GSHA) regarding how athletics will look this fall amid COVID-19 concerns.
“They are continuing to provide statements that they are hopeful that we will enter into a season, a fall sports season, with modifications,” Athletic Director David Henson said during a School Governance Team meeting Wednesday, July 15.
While the department has received guidance regarding competition modifications for softball, they are still waiting for guidance for other fall sports.
“It discusses how to maintain social distancing, how to sanitize the player and equipment during game situations and for what fan interaction looks like through social distancing,” Henson said.
According to Henson, GSHA Director Robin Hinds has indicated that fall sports will move forward and that each school will be responsible for exposure or positive case plans.
“Each program or school will have to have their own plan in place on how to deal with positive tests or exposure in order to mitigate the continued spread,” Henson said. “You will have to arrange, for any competitions missed, have to arrange that the best you can to make those up. If that is not possible, the team that is not able to participate, according to Robin Hinds, would have a forfeit, but the contract would not be enforced as far as making that team that can not participate move into or pay for officials or other things of that nature.
“That’s where we’re at, but that is a fluid document, a fluid decision. We are hopeful, as many of our coaches and players are hopeful, that we will have some semblance of a season.”
The athletics department began conditioning for fall sports earlier in the summer with guidance from GSHA, which came out in May.
“We had 186 students start on June 8, and at this time we are about 215 students that are receiving conditioning and workouts through the various groups that we have,” Henson said. “That’s something we were excited to see. Our coaches were excited to get back and be able to get them into a conditioning process.”
Henson said challenges have occurred due to guidelines requiring sanitizing and maintaining safe environments, and multiple student athletes have tested positive for COVID-19.
“As a result, following our documents and guidelines that we created based on the guidance from GSHA, we have had positive participants or our participants have tested positive for COVID-19,” he said.
These positive cases have resulted in the suspension of football conditioning at the high school and the middle school for 14 days.
“We are continually monitoring our screening process, questioning and temperature and then maintaining social distancing,” Henson said.