California high school sports are back. Here's how the long pause affected athletes.

The COVID-19 pandemic put many high school sports on pause for much of the last year.

But following pressure from groups like “Let Them Play California,” officials in the state’s Department of Public Health and the California Interscholastic Federation recently announced new rules allowing all sports in California to resume play.

That includes not only outdoor sports like football, but indoor sports like basketball and volleyball. The addition of indoor sports comes after a deal with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office last week.

The deal also calls for mandatory COVID-19 testing for all players and coaches.

Under the new rules, high school sports will be allowed to return when a county’s case rate drops below fourteen daily COVID cases per hundred thousand people. Case rates in several Southern California counties, including Los Angeles, just dipped below that level recently.

This debate over whether to let these athletes go back and play has been intense in California.

Bradley Hensley says he co-founded Let Them Play California “out of desperation.”

He said his organization grew as limitations on high school sports stretched beyond last spring, and then through the summer.

“We got to the fall, they canceled, they postponed the season. And they kept saying ‘Oh, next month, next month’” Hensley said. “And they finally issued guidance [on high school sports] in December, and once they issued guidance, we realized the kids would probably never play again and they had no outlets.”

”We basically understood there was no voice for youth rights,” Hensley added. “We really didn’t know what we were doing frankly, and we said, “okay let’s start a Facebook page.”

Hensley’s son is a junior and a quarterback on his high school’s football team. Like many athletes, his son hopes his performance on the field can help him get into college.

“In order to get recruited,” Hensley said, “he needs to have a varsity film and with no games, there’s no film — so [colleges] don’t look at California kids.”

Hosting a sporting event is not without risk. In a guidance document about youth sporting events, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control advises that “safely hosting a large event, including sporting events, in areas where there are high levels of COVID-19 within the community will be challenging.”

But Hensley says many parents worry about the physical and mental health risks of preventing high schoolers from participating in the sports they love.

“We have a mental health crisis with our kids because they have no outlets,” Hensley said. “The damage we’re gonna see is a second pandemic. Depression, isolation, suicide ideation and sadly suicide.

“Sports are proven to help kids both emotionally physically, and psychologically,” Hensley added. “ They’ve lost out on that for several months.”

Clarissa Nuñez, a cross country and track athlete at Oxnard High School, says being away from her team has been hard.“I tended to isolate myself a lot because of the pandemic and because sports were canceled a while now,” Nuñez said. “I just worked out in my room but it’s not the same when you go outside with a team.”

Some coaches wonder how much time with limited practices, training or conditioning will affect some athletes.

“I don’t want to rush things,” said Darnell Furman, the basketball coach at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga. “I still wanna give them as much time as possible to get in shape. Even though we wanna be playing right away I’m concerned with their fitness so I’m gonna have to watch minutes.”

Nuñez has been mentally and physically getting ready.

“I need to like get back out there,” she said. “I had to do you know yoga, I have to run more because I haven’t been able to run because of the pandemic. You know it’s been pretty hard, but I’ve been preparing myself by working out even harder than before.”

Nuñez says sports are important to her and she’s happy to have them back.

“Sports have definitely helped me mentally and both physically,” she said. “I could definitely see the difference when I’m in the sport and when I’m not and like now when things are starting up everything’s like opening up again little by little so it’s like been bettering for myself and everyone else.”

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