Reacting to COVID-19 numbers and the impact on schools, students and athletics, the Alaska School Activities Association relocated high school wrestling to the spring season with the official start date moved to March 15th.
With strict mitigation plans in place and mandatory testing enacted, the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District has approved the long-awaited start to high school wrestling.
Wrestlers at all Kenai Peninsula schools will be required to complete mandatory covid testing twice a week under the mitigation plans approved by the district.
..The testing protocols are listed in the NFHS (National Federation of High Schools) Wrestling Considerations as, “Submit to COVID-19 testing as part of your pre-participation physical.”
..The Alaska School Activities Association (ASAA) under ASAA COVID-19 Wrestling Recommendations states under Wrestling Specifics, all athletes will “follow all NFHS Wrestling Rules Considerations”.
Kevin Lyons, Director of Planning and Operations on district following guidelines.
“So we looked at when we were trying to determine the best path forward for wrestling to try and keep our schools open students safe; we looked at the requirements from both ASAA and NHFS. The other thing that’s interesting as we’ve moved wrestling up into the Spring sports is technology has been continuing and the testing is now available that wasn’t necessarily available back if we would have done it in the normal season.”
Lyons explained the testing requirements, methods and procedures.
“Right now we have 4,000 test kits that we’re using for screening and those are the antigen tests (BinaxNOW). We will be administering those, they’ll actually be administered by the students themselves at the schools and we get our results back in 15 minutes.”
Lyons explained frequency of tests and procedure for a positive test.
“The next step would be to do the more thorough test for them before they took action on that. To date, with the tests we’ve been using at the district at Ninilchik we’ve had zero false positives. We are doing it (testing) twice a week so they’re going to be able to immediately get the results within 15 minutes of taking the test. So, we will probably be doing it (testing) on Tuesday’s and maybe Thursday’s.”
The district has also acquired disinfecting equipment for cleaning the wrestling mats.
“We’ve got a sterilizer which is a 47″ UV mat cleaner that not only addresses covid but all of the other ailments that can come from the wrestling mat. So it’s a good thing to keep our students safe as they are wrestling tin the district.”
“We have one for each of our schools that are doing wrestling right now. Since we are not doing middle school wrestling, we’ve got back-up set up for the high school wrestling for this time. We may be procuring more in the future.”
The KPBSD and peninsula high school administrators are developing covid mitigation plans for spring sports, track, baseball, softball and soccer, which begin practice as early as Monday, March 22nd.
“We have been approving mitigation plans for all the different sports that are getting ready to crank up. A lot of those are going to be outside so there’s going to be a lot more lenient than the indoor activities following the ASAA requirements.”