How East Meadow youth sports navigated the pandemic

Posted

When it comes to thinking about the coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to focus on how youngsters were affected in terms of their education. But youth sports took a big hit due to the restrictions during the pandemic — and some East Meadow organizations did their best to make sure that kids could stay active.

Depending on the sports season, some were in full swing when the pandemic shut things down. Different precautions needed to be taken so that sports could finish, or start their seasons.

For the East Meadow Baseball and Softball Association whose season starts in March, they were among the first to be affected.

“We got hit very hard with Covid because in the beginning both the Town and the County had restrictions on using public places,” Steve LaSala, commissioner of the association, said. “We had no games scheduled in the beginning until they started relaxing some of the outdoor requirements.”

To allow kids to play and be active, while also making sure that everyone was staying safe, the associations separated kids in the dugout as well as move some of them onto the bleachers to maintain social distancing.

LaSala said that they had each team use a different baseball to avoid cross contamination, there was no sliding allowed to avoid touching, and masks were worn until they were no longer so heavily required.

Games were difficult to schedule because time was needed between each game to sanitize everything. Everyday the bathrooms were sanitized three to four times. The dugouts were disinfected twice a day on weekdays, and during their busy time on weekends, they were cleaned after every game. The association had an outside company come in to make sure everything was up to par.

“It was tough,” LaSala said. “Even though we were outside and tried to do social distancing it was difficult at times. Part of us were happy that kids were back playing after everyone was inside for a while.”

What really hit the association hard, though, was the drop in registration.

“Our registration dropped that first year,” LaSala recalled, “probably close to 60 percent.”

The registration numbers are slowly creeping back up, LaSala said, but they’re still not back to pre-pandemic enrollment. They used to have roughly 1,400 kids registered and now they’re only around 1,000.

For the Salisbury Mens Athletic Association’s flag football league, whose season runs from September to the end of November, they tried their hardest to keep the league running.

Pre-pandemic they had about 350 kids who would sign up for the league. They came out of it with about 310 kids, and are now working their way to the roughly 330.

The biggest issue for the league was filling in spots when someone got Covid, or had to stay home due to being exposed by a family member or classmate.

“We had to navigate playing with less kids or borrowing a kid from a different team just so you had enough to play,” Dave Schwarz, the head director for the league. “It just showed how interconnected we all.”

It got tough, he said, when everyone was so close to each other and following the path of exposure.

“You had parents doing the right thing calling us up and saying, ‘look, my son was exposed to so and so who he sits next to in class,’ and all of a sudden you’re making phone calls to find out who else was directly exposed,” Schwarz said. “We had to find kids to play in the holes.”

St. Raphael’s CYO basketball program starts in mid-September and goes until March depending on their playoffs. In 2020, Dave Hudzik, the director of the church’s CYO basketball program, had two teams in the final eight. Right before the final game, everything got shut down.

“It was a huge accomplishment,” Hudzik said. “And when it got shut down and we couldn’t play it really stunk.”

For their 2020-21 season, it was wonky. Some parishes decided not to have leagues, and a consultant company came in to talk about different protocols. The season didn’t even start until late February and went until May.

“My whole thing, while on a conference call with all the directors from different parishes that were going to participate, was I don’t care what we have to do, if we can get these kids on the court, and they can play games — that’s the home run,” Hudzik said. “I said that anybody who doesn’t want to participate, doesn’t have to and I’ll keep their spot and they can come back next year.”

Hudzik said it was him that persuaded the pastor to let the league play.

“I went to him and said, ‘listen, I think we should do it,’” he said. “These kids are home from school, they’ve got nothing going on and they’ve been home all summer and since March.”

The kids played but there was no spectators allowed, and Hudzik said that parents watched through the windows.

During their 2021-22 season it was getting closer to normal, but some parishes still weren’t playing. They had spectators back, but they had to mask, and that’s when things got a little interesting, said Hudzik.

“I had parents, mostly from other programs that came to St. Raphael’s, that were rumbling about the masks,” he said. “But it was what we had to do to get the kids to play and I said I would shut it down if people couldn’t follow the rules.”

LaSala, Schwarz and Hudzik all agreed that the time the away from youth sports and socialization changed the way the kids played when they got back.

“I think sports definitely teaches children fellowship and how to interact a little different from you do in school,” LaSala said. “I definitely think some of the social skills were slow in coming back for the younger ones.”

Kids are meant to be active, Schwarz said.

“Not just social interactions, but everybody knows like from an educational perspective, from a psychological perspective, that kids need to play,” Schwarz said. “For me it was a lot of isolation and that’s bad for kids.”

Not only did socializing skills suffer — the kids moving up were behind on their skills as well.