Turnovers … by Alan B. Gibson

Posted July 29, 2020 at 7:48 am

One strange summer, but the lakes are busy

With no real activities to speak of outside of a few travel baseball and softball games here and there, it’s been a strange summer sports-wise, to say the least.

Still, there is plenty of activity on the lakes, and from what I can see just in our little corner of Dale Hollow Lake, it’s been a big year for boat and PWC dealers.

New boats are aplenty on the water, and they aren’t sitting still very much.

Still, most of the local thoughts are still turned toward high school sports and what is going to happen with that, and like it’s been since things were basically shut down in March, no one knows.

There is a lot of hope still coming out of the KHSAA office in Lexington that we will be seeing some sort of athletic action this fall and again in the winter, but unless Kentucky is able to turn its COVID-19 new cases around pretty quick, I just don’t see it happening.

More and more schools are announcing in the past few days that they will not be starting the school year with in-class instruction, and that being the case, I can’t see officials allowing sports contact if they can’t go to class.

Of course on Monday, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear asked all Kentucky schools, public and private, to not start in-classroom instruction until at least the third week of August, which would be at least August 24.

In Clinton County, it was decided Tuesday morning to not follow that recommendation and instead, move the local in-person classroom start date to a week prior to that recommendation, with classroom instruction starting Monday, August 17. Originally, local schools were planning on a Wednesday, August 12, starting date.

That could change as well, depending on how the case count goes for the next three weeks in the state.

All of this will affect what we see on the fields and in the gyms this fall, and possibly even this winter.

The KHSAA Board of Control was set to hold a special meeting on Tuesday morning of this week, but an agenda for what they were going to discuss wasn’t available.

I reached out to KHSAA spokesperson Mike Fields on Monday about that agenda, and he told me he didn’t have that information, further saying he was “out of the loop” on matters regarding the Board of Control and their meetings.

It was a strange spring. It is a strange summer. I think it’s going to be an even stranger fall.