The Wild Coast Compass recently sat down with Brookings Harbor High School varsity football head coach Shaun Bavaro and talked about the new year, the 2020-21 football program, dealing with COVID-19, and the new normal for coaching and student athletics.
When covid hit earlier in the year, everything stopped and sports schedules ended in mid-March and never resumed for the remainder of the spring/summer seasons as schooled ended in June.
As a program my staff and I flipped our typical schedule of evaluation of the program, film study, coaching clinics and operations in March to prepare for spring ball. We started reviewing our upcoming opponents. We wanted to get ahead start on our opponents we would be playing in fall, as we weren’t sure when we would have contact with our kids again.
The Oregon School Activities Association (OSAA) decided on three sports seasons, with the winter season scheduled for January and February, followed by the fall season in March and April, then the spring season in May and June. Each will have a seven-week regular season.
Once we started getting information from OSAA at the beginning of the summer, we started our deep dive into our program evaluation planning for our sessions in the OSAA season 1.
We’re treating our season 1 session as a combination of spring ball and summer program with on field instruction and strength and conditioning. From a safety stand point we had a nice size group of players making huge strides in the weight room before COVID-19 hit. This is where injury prevention is crucial in athletics. So we lost crucial days, but most of that group has been back at it, and now with the ability to have contact with our student athletes, they have made some nice gains.
Our on the field practice is crucial as we change some of our schemes for this year to fit our athletes a little better and their isn’t much turn around time when OSAA season 2 end and our season officially starts.
So we’re using these 5 weeks of season 1 to have good understanding of our base schemes and improvement in the weight room.
We’re excited to get to compete at end of our 5 week session with some 7 on 7 games with local schools. We’re planning on hosting two games and then we will head on the road for two more.
All the precautions you have to do to be able to practice, like the contract tracing, cleaning, etc. add so much more on the list for things to do on a daily basis. But we will continue follow protocol and build towards are season in the early spring.
Our end goal for our season 1 session is to be healthy, have our base schemes installed, have a little fun competing against other schools and when the end of February hits.., we will hit the ground running!
Our kids need this!
