Just as his peers are doing throughout the Bay Area, West Alameda County Conference commissioner Dave Kiesel is logging serious hours.
There have been schedule revisions on top of schedule revisions and — in case things change again — Kiesel and his league are prepared to make even more schedule revisions.
“It’s like probably every other league,” Kiesel told the Bay Area News Group this week. “It’s a work in progress. We’re doing what we have to do.”
The WACC has 12 member schools — Bishop O’Dowd, San Leandro and Berkeley, among them — plus schools that join the league for a specific sport, such as football, lacrosse and water polo.
In addition, the league has merged for football with the Mission Valley Athletic League — which includes James Logan, Moreau Catholic, Newark Memorial and the Fremont public schools — to form a competitively balanced, multi-division league.
It’s enough to keep the midnight oil burning.
And this week, the path back to high school sports competition became smoother — first with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Monday that the stay-at-home order was being lifted and then news Friday that the North Coast Section’s Board of Managers approved calendar revisions that will allow purple-tier sports to begin as early as Monday.
Kiesel spent a few minutes with the Bay Area News Group a couple of days before the NCS Board of Managers meeting.
Here is what he said:
Darren Sabedra: Do you think you will be able to start purple-tier sports as soon as the NCS gives the thumbs up?
DK: “We’re planning to. The attitude that the athletic directors have taken seems to be it’s much easier to cancel stuff than it is to add it at the last minute. We’ve got schedules that are approved and some other ones that I am working on right now. We have a slight majority of the schools that are planning to go with the purple sports Monday if everything stays the same in terms of the ability to do so and two more schools that probably are going to have to wait a week.
“We only have one district that hasn’t made any decisions yet and they are meeting and working and trying to get organized to do that. We are planning to go. But then if all of a sudden we get pushed back a week or two, we deal with it. We’re starting our practices but because of the fact a lot of these kids haven’t done much or any conditioning at all for a year, we’re going to wait as long as we can before we actually schedule league contests. So we’re going to get kids an extra week or two to learn how to do a flip turn in swimming or run three miles in cross county or something like that. We’re allowing all that extra time in practice before we actually get to contests.
“Almost all of our schools are going to limit themselves to league games this year. If we move through the colors quicker than most people are expecting, there may be some programs that want to play the league to our South or Oakland or the league to our North. But there is not going to be a lot of travel, in any case, this year. We’ve got schedules for almost all the purple sports that we’re working on. If we have to adapt them again, we’ll do that. But we’re just making the assumption that if the (California Department of Public Health), NCS and Alameda County allow something, we’re going to go with it.
DS: What does your model look like?
DK: “We don’t have a model for purple-tier sports because we treat all the sports differently. They may start it at a different time and they may end at a different time. It’s almost a sports-specific kind of thing. We’re working with the Mission Valley Athletic League, as you know, in football. We don’t have a lot of flexibility there. And who knows what’s going to happen with football? If we don’t get to orange, the NCS might decide something or the CIF might decide something. We’ll deal with it when that happens.
“But we’re more sports-specific in terms of how we’re doing stuff rather than color-tiered specific. We don’t have any particular model. I can tell you we’re planning to start the purple sports (practices) this next Monday, and the athletic directors directed me on Monday to develop red-sport schedules that start the first Monday that the county gets into red. Because we know that ahead of time, I just sent out the four proposed baseball schedules to the athletic directors — if we start practice on this date, here is what a schedule can look like. If we start a week later, this is what the schedule will look like. We’re working through the red sports with a start date for whenever the red sports start.
“We’re going to go with the red sports right away (after the county moves into that tier). The thought process with the athletic directors is, ‘Hey look, if we get to red sooner rather than later, those kids in the red sports if we finish them by mid-April, they’ve got an option to play a little soccer or volleyball or badminton. If we finish by mid-April, we can have a mini-season for those Orange sports, if we get that far. If we don’t get that far, then we’re just going to extend the length of time that the red sports play and be flexible there. It changes weekly, almost daily.”
DS: What are you doing with track, a purple-tier sport?
DK: “We’re moving it up. Again, to give those track kids the opportunity to play soccer in late April or May. It’s going to really be a reach to get to yellow and basketball. But there are a lot of purple-sports kids that play soccer and volleyball and badminton. We’re trying to get a couple of seasons in there. If we don’t make it, we don’t make it.
“We’re going to try to get cross county in also, but we’re really treating cross country as a track event and how we do it is still up in the air. There is a bunch of options — maybe using some Saturdays where we don’t have track meets during the week. We’re treating the cross country kids as part of the track cohort, and cross country as an event for track. Many of our coaches are the same.
“We’re moving away from quad-meets and tri-meets. We’re just going to do dual meets this year, in part because a couple of our school districts are saying you run against one other cohort, not more than one. Unless we rapidly get out of this, it’s going to be difficult for Team A to run against Team B and Team C at the same time. So we’re going to have a whole bunch of dual meets on a weekly basis.
“We’re going to try to get in our track championships because they have become a real big event for the league. It’s not so much, ‘Hey getting a time to go on to the North Coast Section, or getting a place to go on to the North Coast Section.’ It’s a league event. So we’re going to try to get that in. Whether we can or not depends on how fast we move through the colors. But we have some plans to do that.”
(Editor’s note: The NCS said it will not have playoffs or championships in any sport this school year)
