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Date: 10/28/2020
SOUTHWICK – While students and members of the community are still upset over the lack of interscholastic sports this year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Superintendent of Schools Jennifer Willard said her top priority is to keep the district safe from the virus.
In September, the Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School Committee initially postponed all fall sports before allowing intramurals, which led to student protests.
Willard said that she is in constant contact with Southwick’s Board of Health and that played a significant role in the district’s decision.
“All of our decisions have been made while we have been in close contact with the Board of Health. We’ve been looking at the data, patterns, and trends from across the state in order to make the best decisions to keep our students and staff safe,” she said.
At this time, she said no decision had been made regarding winter sports.
“We haven’t made a decision yet, currently we are waiting for additional MIAA guidance, which is expected to be released in November,” Superintendent Willard said.
John Cammisa, a senior on the soccer team at Southwick Regional School who co-authored a letter on behalf of the boys and girls soccer teams criticizing the decision, said that intramurals were not the solution the soccer team was hoping for. The letter was sent to Willard and the School Committee as well as Reminder Publishing.
“It’s just a glorified gym class, so we don’t have games and we just kind of practice. A lot of the kids that play soccer don’t want that, and I think that’s why there wasn’t a lot of interest. I think two kids showed up to the first one and it was disbanded after that,” he said.
He added that field hockey and volleyball were still participating in intramural sports.
By losing their interscholastic season, he said that the seniors and juniors would be missing out on two of the most important years in high school athletics.
“As a senior this is the big year for soccer, and to have that taken away is disheartening. For our three juniors, junior year is the biggest recruiting year for colleges and for those three juniors that was taken away. Everyone’s really lost out here,” Cammisa said.
While he said he understood that there would not be a reversal on the decision, Cammisa said that he wanted to continue to voice their opinions about fall sports.
“I wish we got a little more out of the School Committee in terms of success, but sometimes you can’t win. I think we did get a message across even though it didn’t work out in our favor, we are still sharing our voice and what happened,” he said.
Cammisa added that he wishes there were more communication between the district and the community.
“It didn’t have to come to the protest if we had a meeting before then. At that point emails weren’t really getting read and they weren’t really getting acknowledged. I think a meeting to begin this whole situation would have been a much better base to start this whole thing,” he said.