MONROE — The Cheesemakers plan to be back in action this winter, albeit about a month behind schedule.

At the Oct. 26 Monroe School District Board of Education meeting, the board voted 8-1 to delay the start of the winter sports season by a month as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision came a day before Wisconsin recorded more than 5,200 new cases of the virus, the second most in the nation despite being 20th in population. In fact, Wisconsin’s rise in case count on Oct. 27 was more than all but 18 nations worldwide.

The current WIAA start date is Nov. 16. Practices for boys and girls basketball, boys and girls hockey, and wrestling will be able to begin Monday, Dec. 14, with the first competitions eligible to start the week of Dec. 28. Prior to practice officially starting, the school will allow for open gyms and other related activities. 

“Schedules are being adjusted for the new start date as we speak,” Monroe Activities Director Jeff Newcomer said. “The administration is also finalizing the safety protocols that will be used for the season as well.”

Those protocols will include limited attendance, and masks for all spectators. No middle school sports will be played.

The school chose to move its fall sports seasons to the WIAA’s alternate schedule set for late winter/early spring in 2021. The fate of the winter season hung in the balance just as much, and gave renewed hope that a secondary fall season could commence as scheduled.

“This vote helps me think we’ll be able to play football in the spring,” Monroe senior Max Golembiewski said. “Going into the fall season, it was hard to see us playing. The spring option, we understood it.”

Golembiewski is the quarterback of the football team and guard on the boys basketball team. He said he and several players wrote letters to the school board saying that they would be able to “make it work,” or at least “try to make it work.”

“At least let us try,” he said. “We watched the zoom meeting live, and when the vote came in we got very excited and started texting each other saying, ‘Let’s get to work.’”

The players on the team didn’t stop working in the offseason, but now they knew there is an actual season awaiting them, which could drive motivation. Golembiewski said most of the varsity roster plays in an unofficial weekend league at Brookfield Central against mostly Division 1 schools.

“We’ve played pretty well. We think we can have a really good season this year. I would definitely say we have one of the better teams in Monroe history,” Golembiewski said.

The boys team is headed by Golembiewski and Cade Meyer, a UW-Green Bay commit. Juniors Carson Leuzinger and JT Seagreaves were also all-conference picks a year ago, and the team had been expected to make a deep postseason run this year. 

While the Badger Conference will not sponsor a league schedule or postseason awards, and there is still uncertainty with the WIAA’s postseason viability, Golembiewski said just having live sports again would be a boon to student morale.

“The mood is not a great one,” he said of the student body. “Sports could definitely boost our mood a ton. I think it will really help school spirit.”

Patrick Kenny, Monroe’s first-year varsity girls basketball coach, said the novel coronavirus has made his first year at the helm tougher than expected. “It was already challenging enough, now we’ve had limited abilities to just meet in person to go over season expectations.”

Kenny said his players have waiting nine months to get back on the court together, and that they are just looking forward to playing again. 

With Dane and Rock counties having government orders against large gatherings and athletic competitions, Monroe’s schedules could look very different this year, which might mean possible games against smaller, local schools, as well as contests against teams much further away than normal.

“I think we’ll know in the next week or so what our schedule will look like,” Kenny said. “At this point it isn’t so much about who we play, as it is about if we can play. I think the girls are very happy to see that we are going to get a shot to play.”

UW releases COVID-19 study involving high school sports

Dr. Andrew Watson of the Department of Orthopedics & Rehabilitation at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health conducted a study relating the spread of COVID-19 and participation in high school sports. His research team concluded the spread of the virus was actually lower than the number of reported cases by the Wisconsin Department of health services for teenagers 14-17 years of age.

The study was conducted in in Sept. 2020 and included over 30,000 student athletes from 207 schools playing in 16,000 practices and 4,000 competitive games. The majority of the schools involved in the study reported utilizing a broad range of risk mitigation procedures.

There were 271 cases of COVID-19 reported among the student athletes, with zero cases resulting in hospitalization or death. The Wisconsin incident rate was marginally lower than the normal infection rate of all teenagers, by 5/10,000ths new cases per day between Sept. 6 and Oct. 3, 2020. 

Football had the highest incident rate, nearly three times higher than girls tennis. Of the 209 cases among players with a known source of transmission, just one (<0.5%) attributed it to participation in sports. 

“These findings suggest that participation in sports is not associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 among Wisconsin high school student-athletes,” Dr. Watson’s team said it its conclusions. “In fact, no specific sport had a statistically higher incidence rate than the background incidence among adolescents across the state during the same time period. Furthermore, while the number of schools utilizing virtual instruction was small, we identified no difference in COVID-19 incidence between student athletes from schools with in-person versus virtual instruction.”

During the time frame of the study, which lasted 28 days, Wisconsin saw an average of 1,771 new cases per day, with a weekly case average of children 17-24 going from 355 the first week to 840 in the final week. In the 24 days since the study ended, that number has nearly doubled at 3,146 per day, with about 894 new cases children ages 14-17 in the week of Oct. 11, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Health.

The UW team also concluded that while the study shows optimism in allowing youth sports participation during the pandemic, further studies should take place, as regions and schools vary in positive case counts.

“While we hope that this information will help contribute to the ongoing discussions about the relative risks and benefits of youth sport participation, we should recognize that COVID-19 risk will vary in different areas of the country and across age groups,” the team wrote. “Therefore, efforts to assess COVID-19 risk among youth athletes should be expanded and replicated in other populations in order to provide a more complete picture of the risk of COVID-19 transmission during sport participation.”