Ontario students, coaches meet return of school sports with mix of elation and concerns

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Will Madge, 15, always thought he would play on his high-school hockey team, skating with his buddies while friends cheered in the stands. Instead, a year of pandemic-disrupted learning meant he was hardly able to figure out where classrooms were located, let alone put on the school colours at the rink.

“I barely knew anybody last year, because I didn’t get to meet them in school,” says Will, a tall, lean defence man about to start Grade 10 at Toronto’s Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute. “Maybe sports is going to help with that, because really it’s almost like a freshman year.”

It’s no surprise that high-school athletes – along with drama club performers and music lovers – are looking forward to the return of school sports and other extracurriculars under the Ontario government’s back-to-school plan, after missing more than a year of activities that for many play a formative role in their young lives. The absence of high-school gym heroics and school-play stardom, barred by pandemic restrictions even when classes did return, left a void for many in a province where students were kept out of class longer than any other jurisdiction in Canada.

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The provincial guidelines will require masks in classrooms but allow both indoor and outdoor “high-contact sports,” including hockey. (The government says masking indoors for sports will be encouraged, where it is possible.) This despite concerns that heavy breathing, and mixing students in indoor environments, could accelerate the spread of the more contagious Delta variant of COVID-19, particularly among the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.

The government’s plans have some teachers who are supposed to return to coaching concerned. Karen Littlewood, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, said this week that teachers might balk at coaching kids who could be both unmasked and unvaccinated. Hers and the province’s other teachers unions issued a joint statement criticizing the back-to-school plan, calling it incomplete and inadequate and saying it was an attempt to “create the illusion of normalcy.”

Health experts had a mixed reaction to the plan, which actually goes farther on requiring masks than the rules recommended in a report released last month from Ontario’s independent COVID-19 Science Advisory Table and the province’s paediatric hospitals.

Ari Bitnun, a lead author of the report and a paediatric infectious diseases physician at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital, said he hopes that the province will reevaluate its mask requirements if vaccination rates continue to increase and community transmission remains low.

“People tend to just look at this about COVID, but we need to think about the well-being of kids in general,” he said. “If you balance the risks related to COVID versus the risks of the harms of the interventions that we use to mitigate COVID, I think some loosening is reasonable.”

Krista Caron, head of physical education at Dr. Frank Hayden Secondary School in Burlington, west of Toronto, coaches student athletes in a range of sports. Even leaving aside concerns about a resurgence of COVID-19, she said, coaches need to remember that many students haven’t been physically active for much of the past two years and may need – for both their mental and physical health – to ease back into competitive sports.

“I’m cautiously optimistic, although I would have liked to have seen a phased-in approach,” Ms. Caron said, noting that in a normal fall, her school would be hosting field-hockey tournaments within just weeks of the start of the school year. “It seems to be all-in, full steam ahead, rather than, wait and see how things go for six weeks.”

Mary Loeffler, a French teacher and girls rugby coach at M.M. Robinson High School, also in Burlington, Ont., said the pandemic snatched away the entire last season from her graduating students in spring of 2020.

The sport, Ms. Loeffler said, welcomes girls of all shapes and sizes – as well to those who have never played rugby before – and so gives many of her players, some of whom might otherwise drift away from team sports, a much-needed confidence boost.

“I would hate to see that lost, considering all that adolescents have gone through,” she said.

Andy Wood, a Toronto parent who has a son in high school and a daughter in middle school, said his children are looking forward to participating in extracurricular activities again, with his son excited to try football and join the debate club. But Mr. Wood said he wasn’t sure if schools will actually resume extracurriculars if individual school boards or staff are uncomfortable with the risks.

“We’re encouraged that it seems like we’re getting back to normal but worried about what the implementation is actually going to look like and whether or not we can actually … get extracurriculars going again,” Mr. Wood said.

Sitting on his back porch, Will recounts the exploits of his Grade 7 cricket team – an eternity ago when you are 15 – which had a roster of kids new to the sport. They lost a heart-breaking game in the citywide finals in 2019. But in 2020, the pandemic cancelled their chance at redemption before Grade 8 graduation.

There will be no reliving that potential lost cricket glory. But Will, who is fully vaccinated, says he is looking forward to sports retaking their place in his life, reducing the time spent in the pandemic playing video games and going for long, aimless bike rides.

“Kids now go for bike rides. You want to do something? You just go bike. You just go off and you are gone for three hours, grab something to eat. I think I have biked more in the past two summers than I did in my entire life.”

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