The head of the Nebraska School Activities Association says he’s working toward a full high school sports schedule for the fall semester as school districts grapple with how to handle the pandemic in the upcoming school year. NSAA Executive Director Jay Bellar says there are no plans to delay the fall sports season, which includes football and volleyball among other sports. The NSAA has discussed scenarios that include how to handle interrupted seasons.
“We’ve even talked about in our office that if we get three-fourths of the way through the football season and for whatever reason we can’t finish before the winter sports are supposed to start, that we could finish that season after the winter season and then go on to spring and maybe extend the spring into June sometime,” Bellar said. “We’ve talked about a lot of different case-scenarios and don’t know how that’s going to go for sure.”
Bellar was encouraged by the Shrine Bowl high school all-star football game on Saturday in Kearney and thinks contact sports can be played safely despite coronavirus. But the NSAA won’t require coronavirus testing for the upcoming season.
“We try to really stay away from requiring or even recommending the testing because we know that’s an unfunded mandate that would come from us that they have to do when it’s going to be quite expensive for them, so we would leave that type of determination up to the schools and the local health departments.”
Bellar says the NSAA will remain flexible and make necessary changes if the pandemic becomes worse in Nebraska.