By Bobby Narang
While sports rages on in neighboring states, the high school athletes Illinois continue to remain in limbo.
At least, after several months of back-and-forth discussions and delays, there was a small dose of positive news in the middle of this month.
Since November 17, 2020 high school athletes throughout the State basically have been unable to practice, or play when updates by the Illinois Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 guidelines led the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) to pause all events.
Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced January 15 that three regions in the state, 1, 2 and 5, are being rolled back from Tier 3 mitigations to Tier 2 mitigations.
Region 1 consists of many counties in northern Illinois, including Boone and DeKalb among them, while Region 2 is mainly North-Central Illinois, Rock Island, Peoria, and Region 5 is predominately schools in southern Illinois.
“Of our remaining regions, the data shows that most are on track to leave Tier 3 in the coming days if current trends hold,” Pritzker said.
However, basketball and football, both deemed high risk, remain in question on the start date of their respective sports. Earlier, the IHSA rolled out a plan in which the Winter sports season was slated to last from November 16 to February 13, minus basketball. But those plans were quickly scrapped after Pritzker put the State on pause in November.
For the majority of Chicago and the suburbs, the low risk sports, such as badminton, bowling, cheerleading, dance, gymnastics, softball, tennis, swimming and diving and track and field, were moved to Tier 2.
Per the IHSA, those teams can start practicing immediately and can play games in the near future when the Board determines the ideal time.
“This is certainly positive news for three regions of the State, but we still have a long way to go until we get all of our student-athletes back to being active,” IHSA executive director Craig Anderson said. “High school student-athletes are hurting from a mental, physical, and emotional, standpoint, so we hope this is the first step toward getting that back to some (normality).”