Local High School Teams Adapting and Preparing for an Unprecedented Spring Season

Leaves covered the ground and autumn colors brightened the mountains of central Virginia as the month of October rolled to a close, but one major component of a traditional fall season remained missing: high school football.

“It’s crazy,” Heritage High School Head Coach Brad Bradley said. “Right now, the weather … this is football season, man. We should be in football season right now and we’re not.”

While stadiums sit empty each Friday night, coaches like Bradley and LCA Athletic Director and Head Coach Frank Rocco and their players wait patiently, hopeful for the VHSL’s promised winter slate of games, scheduled to begin in February. 

“It will be different not to play in the fall, which is your typical history in the sport of football,” Rocco said. “But I think it will be exciting. It will give us a little change-up of what the norm is.” 

After weighing three options for how to coordinate fall sports in the wake of the pandemic, on July 27 the VHSL executive committee voted 34-1 for the model which would move all fall sports to spring 2021, effectively postponing all competitions for the fall season. 

As part of the plan, the leagues officials condensed the seasons of winter (December through February), fall (February through May) and spring (April through June) sports to 60% of what the normal regular season schedule would be.

Ultimately, Virginia became one of 16 states without fall football competitions. However, the clear plan moving forward did bring some encouragement to the otherwise disappointed coaches in the area.

“The fact that (the VHSL) made a consistent declaration and said that every school in the state of Virginia is playing in the spring – our kids embraced that and understood that we are all doing this thing and nobody is getting better or more than anybody else,” Rocco said. “We are all going to play the same kind of schedule in the spring.”

At the same time, seeing over 30 states opt to still play the fall season was frustrating and confusing, Rocco admitted.

“It is (weird), and especially a (few) weeks ago when it would have been the start of high school football season and you turn on the TV and you watch four or five high school games that were being played in other states on ESPN,” Rocco said. “You get the sense like, ‘Woah, how are they playing and we’re not playing?’ So, you need to get over that (feeling) a little bit.”

Despite that feeling, both Rocco and Bradley recognized that the decisions of the VHSL are out of their control and instead encouraged their teams to focus on preparing for the spring season. LCA and Heritage met in the Region 3C semifinals last fall – Heritage made it to the state semifinals before losing to Lord Botetourt – and both teams have a core of talented players returning. 

Before the decision was officially made to postpone fall competition to the spring, the VHSL laid out guidelines for schools to begin practicing over the summer. Practices could begin as of mid-June, but all schools were required to submit a plan to the Virginia Department of Education outlining how they plan to comply with the CDC and state guidelines.

Heritage did not begin practices until mid-July, but when they did the athletes flocked back to the school, eager to participate – even despite rigorous guidelines requiring separate entrances and exits to the field, daily temperature screenings and physical distancing of more than 10 feet between athletes.

“These kids want to come back (because) a) they want to be a part of something special – and I feel like our program (at Heritage) has been something special over the last seven to nine years,” Bradley said. “B) they want to have social interaction. They want to be back with their teammates. C) they want to be as close to back to normal as possible. This is as close as back to normal as we can get right now.”

Bradley gave a lot of credit to Heritage’s head athletic trainer Chris Hallberg, who helped develop and implement protocols to keep the players safe and allow them to return to the field.

One of the more obscure obstacles for Hallberg and Bradley was the restrictions in regard to the use of footballs at practice. According to Bradley, his team couldn’t practice with a football until early September, and even then, all players were required to wear gloves – even requiring the use of surgical gloves if an athletes were to forget their football gloves for practice – and each individual needed to use their own ball.

“Every kid is assigned a ball,” Hallberg said. “So (running back) Zach Steele, let’s say he has ball No. 1, that’s the ball he is staying with all day. After every throw, he is wiping it down. The only people that are touching it are him, the center and the quarterback – that’s it.”

“Normally, you play football with only one football,” Bradley said. “That quarterback can throw the football to anybody he wants to. I mean, that only makes sense, it’s football. Well, now, he has to throw the ball to whoever gives him the ball to him or the center.”

One thing both Bradley and Rocco lauded their players for was their willingness to comply with the guidelines. For all of them, the opportunity to be back out on the field is worth jumping through so many hoops.

“If you would step out in the hallway in between periods here (at LCA), you would see our entire student body wearing masks,” Rocco said. “To me, that is an amazing thing that you have 1,000 school-aged kids that are following that rule, which they have never had to do before. They are all 100% compliant.” 

One such student athlete who has worked diligently despite the restrictions has been LCA offensive lineman and five-star college recruit Zach Rice.

Rice is listed as the No. 12 recruit in the country for the class of 2022 and has received 31 offers, including from powerhouse programs like Alabama and Ohio State. While missing the fall season is a setback for Rice, his positive attitude is one that others on his team have also adopted.

“It honestly shocked me because I really wanted to play,” Rice said. “But I took it two ways, really. I had a talk with my mom and that was like, ‘Either you got to get ready or you got to stay ready.’ So, right now I am just staying ready because … I have (several) months to get better and work on my craft.”

Ultimately, for Bradley, Rocco and teams across Virginia, the postponement of the fall sports season was a historic decision that brought a lot of questions and concerns along with it. 

While almost everyone involved with high school football would rather be on the field and playing in front of fans this fall, the silver lining of a planned spring season is the carrot that keeps them moving forward.

Being back out on the gridiron will be worth the wait, whenever that happens.

“As long as we get our season, I don’t care,” Bradley said. “It’s pretty simple.”

Christian Weaner is the Asst. Sports Editor. Follow him on Twitter at @christianweaner.