John Steigerwald: Kudos to PIAA for giving student-athletes chance to compete

The PIAA was right.

High school athletes all over Pennsylvania should be glad the organization that oversees high school sports in Pennsylvania didn’t listen to the so-called experts.

Here’s what Pa. Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said Aug. 18: “The recommendation from the governor and myself is that all school sports be postponed until Jan. 1. And that would include school sports and also recreational sports and clubs sports. I think the governor has been very clear about this recommendation, and we’ve been consistent in terms of how we are describing it as a recommendation.”

And Levine went to say the PIAA should, “Take the same lessons about covid-19 that Penn State took and the Big Ten took and the Pac-12 took, and that school sports be postponed as well as recreational sports.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, high school sports were played all around the state this fall, with most of them now going into the postseason, and the kids seem to have survived.

The Big Ten is playing football, and the Pac-12 opens Saturday. The prospects for Penn State and the Big Ten didn’t look good Aug. 11 when Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren wrote a letter to the member schools in response to protests and petitions, saying the vote by the presidents and chancellors was “overwhelmingly in support of postponing fall sports and will not be revisited.”

Fortunately, another dumb decision was revisited and reversed.

A recent study done by the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Association shows just how wrong the experts were. It observed high school sports to determine how they have contributed to the spread of covid-19.

The conclusion: They haven’t.

The surveys were completed by 207 Wisconsin schools and included 30,000 athletes participating in 16,000 practices and 4,000 games in September.

Schools were asked to report the source of the transmission of any positive cases among players. There were 271 infections, and 96% of the cases came from household contacts (55%) or community contact (40%).

Ready for the number of infections attributed to sports activity? One.

For football, 162 schools were surveyed, covering 8,222 players and 187,881 person-days. Eighty-six students contracted covid-19. The incidence rate from playing football was 0.000458.

Think of all the kids in Pennsylvania who would not have been able to play sports for the last two months if the PIAA and the member schools had listened to the experts.

The WIAA took a nationwide survey of 13,000 high school athletes in May to measure the impact of the cancellation of spring sports and applied that data to student-athletes in Wisconsin.

“We found that physical activity levels have dropped by 50% during the pandemic, and symptoms of depression have increased dramatically,” the organization said. “Prior to 2020, less than 10% of Wisconsin athletes reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression. Following the widespread cancellation of school and spring sports due to covid-19, this number had risen to 33%.”

So if the PIAA had listened to the experts, the mental health of thousands of high school students probably would have suffered.

As the number of cases of covid rise in Pennsylvania, those experts may be tempted to shut down high school sports again during winter sports season.

They should read the conclusion from the Wisconsin study: “These findings suggest that participation in sports is not associated with an increased risk of covid-19 among Wisconsin high school student-athletes. The total case rate and incidence rate reported by this statewide sample representing over 30,000 student-athletes are lower than those reported by the Wisconsin department of health services for 14- to 17-year-olds during the same time period.”

Did you get that? Kids playing sports are less likely to come down with covid-19 than kids who don’t play sports.

Too bad so many senior athletes last spring had to have their final seasons taken away from them because the experts wanted to keep them “safe.”