The CIF announced that all California schools will not be allowed to start football practices sooner than Dec. 14 and games no sooner than Jan. 8. Girls volleyball will start on Dec. 19 and cross country on Dec. 26.

Athletic Director Bob Greene said, “It throws you off in your timing. There’s a natural progression of fall, winter, spring.  It makes sense, it’s part of our history, our culture, now a lot of that is thrown out of the window.” 

“The most significant change we will see will be more in the guidelines and protocols we will have to follow. Pre-screening before workouts, practices, games, etc., will become more of the norm,” stated Athletic Director Jay’Sen Morris ’07. 

“Although we have projected dates for competitions, many other things need to get answered or addressed before actually playing a game. When the competition starts, there may be restrictions on transportation, spectators, support staff, etc. I believe playing games will be the easy part. Everything that we will need to do or have before a game will be the challenging part,” he added. 

“Guys and gals are going to have to make decisions on what sports to play because, let’s just take the sports of wrestling and baseball. Historically, we’ve had a decent number of baseball players who wrestle. Well, that’s worked out good because one’s a winter sport and one’s a spring sport. And there’s a little overlap but nothing too major, right? But now, both sports start on the same day, March 15th, so now their seasons are running at the exact same time,” Bob Greene noted. 

Greene added, “There is no rule that says that you can’t play two sports for your high school at the same time, but [with] the realities of limitations of things you can do, it’s hard to envision you’re going to play on a team and miss part of the time to play on another team.”

There are no certainties on how the winter sports season is going to shape out, but what is known is that all of the Crusaders, freshmen to seniors, girls and boys, will play their very best and will try to get as much work in before and during the season to help their teams have a successful 2021 campaign.the