MEBANE, N.C. — Eastern Alamance High School head football coach John Kirby took a short break from practice to watch from the side of the field Friday morning. The Eagles have about two weeks until their first game, up against Eastern Randolph High School.
“People are just looking to get back to some sort of normalcy,” Kirby said, wearing a windbreaker and shorts in the team’s signature green and yellow.
The coronavirus pandemic canceled fall football last year in North Carolina and around the country. Everyone on the field Friday morning was excited to be back at school. But rising coronavirus numbers mean COVID-19 could still get in the way of whatever “normal” means in 2021.
The fog had rolled in since the 80-some kids started practice at 6 a.m. You could barely see the players practicing on the other side of the field
“Mebane is a special town for football. The whole town closes down on Friday nights,” Eastern Alamance senior Jake Libbey said. Last year they only got to play six regular season games and the school had limited capacity in the stands.
“Last year we didn’t get to walk down our stadium. Now we get to do that this year and it’s just a crazy atmosphere, everybody’s just excited to see us play,” said Dontrell Lee, another senior on the team.
“You don’t realize what you’ve got until you lose it,” Kirby said. “By not having football last fall, it felt like it put an empty spot in everybody’s heart because football’s as important to our community as it is to all other communities in the state of North Carolina.”
As students get ready to go back to class, many for the first time in more than a year, the debate over masks in schools has taken over many districts. The state left it up to local school districts to decide.
The Alamance County Board of Education made masks mandatory for all students and staff while inside, but not out on the field.
When state public health officials recommended requiring masks for all inside school buildings, they were following the advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and research from the ABC Science Collaborative at Duke University.
The Duke researchers found that masks work.
“If you want to prevent COVID transmission in your community, if you want to prevent COVID transmission at your schools, it’s masking until we have sufficiently high vaccination,” Duke pediatrician Danny Benjamin said.
Benjamin and the other researchers studied data from 100 districts in North Carolina during the last school year. He said one group was particularly at risk: student-athletes.
“There’s more transmission in the extracurricular activities than there is in the classroom setting,” he said.
The best way to keep student-athletes safe is for them to get vaccinated, Benjamin said. And if they won’t get vaccinated, they should be wearing masks and getting tested regularly.
“Testing should be conducted routinely as a condition of doing sports,” he said. But students who get vaccinated could skip testing.
The coach says he hasn’t gotten much direction from the North Carolina High School Athletics Association about keeping kids safe on the field.
In the spring, Kirby said, everyone has to wear masks on the field. “It was hard to police,” he said. But this school year, high school students can get the Pfizer vaccine.
The High School Athletics Association has put out some limited coronavirus guidelines about wearing masks indoors and social distancing on team benches for unvaccinated players and staff. But the association’s site stops short of saying all students and coaches should get the vaccine.
The association did not return voicemail or email from Spectrum News 1 requesting comment.
Kirby said he’s vaccinated: “I got it as early as I could,” he said. But he’s been told not to ask his players whether they’ve gotten a coronavirus vaccine.
Last year, some on the Eastern Alamance team had to quarantine for a week and missed a game because of the coronavirus - not an experience their coach wants to repeat this year.
“We love our kids and we love our players and we love what we do. You know, our health is at stake as well, and so we take precautions to ensure the safety of the players, the athletes, and our coaching staff,” he said. “We’re all in this thing together and it’s going to take us all to make this work.
Mask rules and getting vaccinated for COVID-19 have become political debates, not scientific ones.
“I think we’ve probably let this become too politicized and we’ve forgotten what’s most important, and that’s supporting kids while they are participating in athletics,” said George Robinson, district athletic director for the Alamance-Burlington school system.
“If safety is going to get a vaccine, then that’s probably the responsible thing to do,” he said. “If safety for somebody’s child or somebody’s grandparent that happens to be at a game means wearing a mask so they don’t become infected with a debilitating illness, then that’s the responsible thing to do.”
The players who spoke with Spectrum News 1 said they were just happy to be back.
“As long as we can play ball,” Eastern Alamance senior Carter Stallings said.