Wyoming Indian cancels fall sports season

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Note: This is a breaking news story. It will be updated as necessary with new information as it becomes available. Be sure to refresh your browser to see the latest version of the story.

Wyoming Indian High School became the second school on the Wind River Indian Reservation to cancel its fall sports schedule, WIHS activities director Keith Bauder said.

In an email to wyoming-football.com, Bauder said the school will start classes online. The school will reconsider moving back to in-person classes on Oct. 1, with the earliest move to face-to-face classes being Oct. 16.

“It is sad for our students but we have to look at the safety factor first for students and families in our area,” Bauder said via email.

Wyoming Indian’s Board of Trustees voted 5-0 Tuesday to continue classes online. The school announced the decision on Twitter.

Wyoming Indian joins St. Stephens as schools that have had to cancel fall sports and move classes online to start the semester. St. Stephens’ school board made a similar move last week.

Wyoming Indian plays in Class 1A nine-man football and Class 2A in cross country and volleyball. The Wyoming Indian boys cross country program has won 22 state championships, including 13 since 2003. The girls cross country team won its first state title last year.

In an interview with wyoming-football.com on Wednesday, Bauder said the decision from the Board of Trustees helped put first the safety not only of the students but of the community.

“It’s sad because you know how important it is to the kids,” Bauder said. “Out here, families are very close and big, and their culture is family (centered).”

Both Wyoming Indian and St. Stephens are on the Wind River Indian Reservation, where a stay-at-home order has been in place for several months.

“There were so many ‘ifs’ and no answers,” Bauder said. “You can do all the planning you want, but when you’re working with ‘ifs,’ you can have every precaution you want, and (there’s a chance) it still happens.”

Bauder said students from schools closed by COVID-19 could compete for other schools for the fall sports season. When the closed schools re-open, though, those students have to choose whether to stay at their new school or return to their old school. Once students make that choice, Bauder said, they have to stick with it or be subject to traditional transfer rules.

“We haven’t crossed that bridge, but I’m sure we will,” Bauder said. “It’s sad (to lose students), but it gives the kids the opportunity to compete, which is good. We just hope we can get them all back again.”

This story will be updated as new information becomes available.

–patrick

This story was updated at 8:53 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 5, with comments from Bauder.

St. Stephens cancels fall sports seasons

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Note: This is a breaking news story. It will be updated as necessary with new information as it becomes available. Be sure to refresh your browser to see the latest version of the story.

St. Stephens Indian School has canceled all fall sports for 2020, including football, and will have students participate in remote learning until at least Oct. 16.

An announcement from St. Stephens Superintendent Frank No Runner announcing the changes was posted to the St. Stephens school’s Facebook page on Friday afternoon.

The post said the St. Stephens school board met Friday morning and decided to move forward with several changes to start the school year.

Those changes include no sports for high school or junior high students and online learning until at least Oct. 16.

In his post, No Runner said safety was the primary concern for the decision.

“It was hard to come to this decision, but we are thinking about student and staff safety, and for our elders, if we lose them we lose valuable cultural and traditional knowledge that cannot be replaced,” No Runner’s post said.

The full post is available here:

In an interview Friday afternoon with wyoming-football.com, St. Stephens football coach Billy Brost said he understood the decision but was also frustrated by it.

“I know they’re trying to do right by the kids and the teachers and the families, but it’s just heartbreaking to me that everyone else is going to be playing and we’re aren’t,” Brost said.

St. Stephens’ cross country and volleyball teams will also have their seasons canceled. The football team was scheduled to play in Class 1A nine-man, while volleyball was set to move from Class 1A to Class 2A this fall.

Per capita, Fremont County — where St. Stephens is located — has had more cases of COVID-19 and more COVID-related deaths than any other Wyoming county. Data from the Wyoming Department of Health shows, as of Friday, 411 laboratory-confirmed cases of the disease in the county. Of the 26 COVID-related deaths in Wyoming, 10 have been in Fremont County, the most of any Wyoming county.

Along with St. Stephens, three other high schools — Wyoming Indian, Fort Washakie and Arapaho Charter — also operate on the Wind River Reservation. Of those, Wyoming Indian is the only school to offer full varsity athletics. Other Fremont County schools, those off reservation land, include Lander, Riverton, Wind River, Shoshoni and Dubois.

Brost said while he will miss coaching, he will also miss teaching; he teaches social studies at the school.

“It’s not just about sports,” he said. “It’s so many things that high school kids should have the right to experience that they don’t now because of this pandemic. … My heart breaks for them because they so need that interaction.

“They’re being robbed of it, and fingers crossed that things calm down by the beginning of October so we can have kids in our classroom.”

This story will be updated as new information becomes available.

–patrick

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified No Runner’s position with St. Stephens schools. He is the superintendent.

WHSAA sets COVID-19 contingency plans for football schedule

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The Wyoming High School Activities Association has built several different schedules to accommodate varying start times for a 2020 football season.

Right now, games are scheduled to begin on Aug. 28. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic sparking postponements and cancellations of events across the country, and with schools themselves trying to figure out how to best accommodate students, an on-time start to the football season is not certain.

The different contingency plans established by the WHSAA, shared with wyoming-football.com by WHSAA Commissioner Ron Laird, depend on when a safe start to the season can take place. For each week lost, the plans change.

Laird said Monday that each sport has its own potential contingencies set up for the fall if the start of the season is delayed or if time is lost during the middle of the season.

“We’re trying to play,” Laird said. “That’s the key. We want kids to be able to participate, and we’re going to do everything we can to make that happen.”

Football’s contingency plans

For football, the ramifications of late starts range widely. On one of the spectrum, a week or weeks of the schedule may be canceled. The later the start to the season, though, the more challenging the changes become, including eliminating playoff rounds, changing the date and location for championship games, and finding new ways to seed teams for playoffs.

The football season would start no later than Oct. 16. Scheduling championship games for the week of Friday, Nov. 20 — which would happen if the season starts any later than Sept. 18 — is also complicated by the University of Wyoming’s home football game scheduled with Boise State on Saturday, Nov. 21. In contingencies where championships are moved to the week of Nov. 20, the higher-seeded team will host the championship game. In Class 3A and 1A six-man, the East Conference champions will be the higher seeds, while in Class 2A and 1A nine-man, West Conference champions will be the higher seeds. However, if the two teams played each other during the regular season, the winner of the game will host the championship.

Class 4A could also move to a North-South conference schedule, with Sheridan, Campbell County, Thunder Basin, Natrona and Kelly Walsh in the North and Cheyenne Central, Cheyenne East, Cheyenne South, Laramie and Rock Springs in the South. However, a move to conference play for playoff seeding is the decision of the 4A schools, not of the WHSAA, and may not come until after the season starts, Laird said.

Playoff qualification; uneven cancellations

More broadly, Laird said, if chunks of the conference schedule are lost, and teams can’t complete the conference schedule, the coaches themselves will meet to decide which teams will qualify for the playoffs.

Laird said the WHSAA members looked at a variety of power-rating or RPI methods to seed teems, including the one Wyoming used in the 2000s. Ultimately, they decided a coach seeding meeting would work best, similar to what coaches do for seeding for regional wrestling meets.

Laird said some arguments may develop — most likely between teams tied for a playoff spot — but said the coaches “would know best the teams in their conferences.”

Laird also said teams may need to prepare for uneven cancellations affecting the schedule; one district, or one county, deciding to suspend school or activities due to an outbreak does not mean other schools would follow suit. Consequently, some teams may play more games than others.

“There’s a good chance we’re not going to have competitive equity this year,” he said.

If such cancellations happen, Laird said any scheduled games would be counted as no-contest games, not as forfeits. Playoff seeding would still remain with coaches.

“We don’t want to penalize the school over something they have no control over,” Laird said.

Rescheduling games in such circumstances could also be a possibility, Laird said.

Also, schools that don’t reach the playoffs in a shortened season can schedule games with other non-playoff teams during playoff weeks.

Other considerations: Midseason changes, UW

While the contingency plans outline what would happen with late starts to the season, Laird said the WHSAA is also looking into steps to take if one week or a group of weeks midseason is lost.

“We’ve tried to ‘what-if’ it as much as we could,” Laird said.

Laird also acknowledged that if the University of Wyoming can’t play its football season as scheduled, “it’s going to be pretty tough for us to play.”

Football is not alone

Other fall sports will also feel ramifications of contingency scheduling, Laird said. For volleyball, cross country, golf and swimming, he said schedules may need to be shifted to avoid large invitational meets, where large numbers of people could mean a higher likelihood of contagion transmission.

Moving fall sports to the spring also remains a possibility, but Laird said “it isn’t as clean as that sounds. … It is basically the last, last resort. It will be a trickle-down if we move that, and then we’ve got to move other things.”

Particularly, Laird said moving fall sports to the spring would affect track and soccer for a second consecutive year, something he said he wants to avoid.

Laird said the WHSAA’s overall goal was to return students to activities “and do it safely for everybody.”

A breakdown of football’s plan

The WHSAA’s full contingency plan for football is here. Here’s a quick breakdown of how the schedule changes with each week pushed back:

  • Season starts Week 1 (Sept. 4): Zero Week contests are canceled, no make-up.
  • Season starts Week 2 (Sept. 11): Zero Week contests and Week 1 games are canceled, no make-up.
  • Season starts Week 3 (Sept. 18):
  • For 4A and 3A, Zero Week, Week 1 and Week 2 games are canceled, no make-up.
  • For 2A, 1A nine-man and 1A six-man, Week 2 games are moved to the week of quarterfinal playoffs, and no quarterfinal playoff round is played.
  • Season starts Week 4 (Sept. 25):
  • For 4A and 3A, Week 3 games move to the original week of the quarterfinal playoffs (Oct. 30). Playoff games are all shifted back one week, with championships scheduled for Nov. 20.
  • For 2A, 1A nine-man and 1A six-man, Week 2 games are moved to the week of Oct. 30 and Week 3 games to Nov. 6. There would be no quarterfinal playoffs, with semifinals on Nov. 13 and championships Nov. 20.
  • Season starts Week 5 (Oct. 2):
  • For 4A and 3A, all games are pushed back one week and week 3 games are moved to the original week of semifinals. Quarterfinal playoffs are eliminated, and semifinal games would be played Nov. 13 (the original week of championships) and championships Nov. 20.
  • For 2A and 1A nine-man, a six-game regular season, as the schedule would go Week 5-Week 6-Week 7-Week 8-Week 2-Week 3, with Week 4 games eliminated. Again, there would be no quarterfinal playoffs, with semifinals on Nov. 13 and championships Nov. 20.
  • For 1A six-man, a six-game regular season, as the schedule would go Week 5-Week 6-Week 7-Week 8-Week 2-Week 4, with Week 3 games eliminated. Again, there would be no quarterfinal playoffs, with semifinals on Nov. 13 and championships Nov. 20.
  • Season starts Week 6 (Oct. 9):
  • For 4A and 3A, a five-week regular season (with possible rescheduling in 4A), with the schedule going Week 6-Week 7-Week 8-Week 4-Week 5. Semifinals would be Nov. 13 and championships Nov. 20.
  • For 2A and 1A nine-man, a six-week regular season with a schedule of Week 6-Week 7-Week 8-Week 2-Week 3-Week 5. No quarterfinal or semifinal playoffs; conference champions would meet in the state championship on Nov. 20.
  • For 1A six-man, a six-week regular season with with a schedule of Week 6-Week 7-Week 8-Week 5-Week 2-Week 4. No quarterfinal or semifinal playoffs; conference champions would meet in the state championship on Nov. 20.
  • Season starts Week 7 (Oct. 16):
  • For 4A and 3A, five-week regular season (with possible rescheduling in 4A), with the schedule going Week 7-Week 8-Week 4-Week 5-Week 6. No quarterfinals or semifinals; conference champions would meet in state championship games Nov. 20.
  • For 2A and 1A nine-man, a five-week regular season with the schedule going Week 7-Week 8-Week 2-Week 3-Week 5. Again, no quarterfinals or semifinals, with conference champs playing in the title game Nov. 20.
  • For 1A six-man, a five-week regular season with the schedule going Week 7-Week 8-Week 5-Week 6-Week 4. Again, no quarterfinals or semifinals, with conference champs playing in the title game Nov. 20.

–patrick

#bethelight in Wyoming

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Here’s a collection of Friday’s #bethelight and #bethelightwy posts in Wyoming on social media. If you’ve got one that you’d like me to consider posting here, email me at pschmiedt@yahoo.com; I’d love to have one post from each school that participated.

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Be The Light. Well done, Pinedale!?

A post shared by Altitude Drug & Wyoming Gifts (@altitudedrugandwyominggifts) on

2020 Wyoming Shrine Bowl canceled due to COVID-19 risks

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For the first time since it began in 1974, the Wyoming Shrine Bowl all-star football game won’t be played.

The 2020 version of the game won’t be played due to risks associated with the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, a release from Wyoming Shrine Bowl executive director Frank Selby said.

“The overall well-being of our communities remains on the forefront of our minds as we weather these uncertain times,” the release said. ” … In addition to potential risks that linger as game time nears, we cannot in good conscience ask for financial support from communities as they are left reeling in economic effects associated with the outbreak.”

In the release, Selby apologized for the inability to stage the game. He said players coaches, trainers and managers — who had already been selected for the game — as well as others associated with the now-canceled game will still receive recognition.

“Our focus at this time is to ensure that the players, coaches and participants are justly recognized for their achievements and the commitment that brought us together,” the release said.

The game acts as a fundraiser for the Shriner’s Hospital for Children. The game has raised more than $450,000 since its inception, the Wyoming Shrine Bowl website said, with $30,000 raised last year.

Selby said the game will return, as the 2021 Shrine Bowl is scheduled for June 12, 2021, in Casper.

Here is the full press release.

–patrick

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