PLAY, DELAY OR STAY AWAY? -- MONDAY CARDINAL COUPLE

 JCPS ATHLETIC BOARD MAKES THE CALL TONIGHT

The Jefferson County Public School Athletic Board meets this evening to make a decision on fall sports in the Louisville area. 

If you're wondering what exactly this has to do with the joy and excitement of University of Louisville athletics, consider the rosters of the women's fall sports squads on the Belknap campus. You'll find several "homegrown" student athletes on the squads. Women's Soccer star Emina Ekic, who went to Louisville Manual. Sam Minrath and India Reed both played field hickey locally. Louisville Volleyball has a couple as well on  the 2020 roster with Alexa Hendricks and Anna DeBeer. Local talent has always been a "feeder"for the Louisville fall women's sports squads -- and there are many other high school seniors who have played at Jefferson County high schools and gone on to other colleges and universities to establish student-athlete careers. 

Earlier this month, the KHSAA (Kentucky High School Athletic Association) voted to proceed with fall sports. Jefferson County, however, has a bit of different circumstances than some of the smaller counties and communities that make up the KHSAA. The wider spread of COVID-19 being the main one. 

This is a decision ahead that isn't going to be popular, no matter which way the athletic board votes. 

If they decide to start fall sports, there will be worry about the health and safety of the participants, coaches and those who attend the events as fans. If they cancel the fall events, there will be an outcry from the coaches, parents and student-athletes who want events and participation. The third option is a delay. That, in itself, had subsections -- in, how long a delay? For a month, until the spring, until January 1st, 2021? 

This is no easy decision to make and I'm glad I'm not on that board that will make the decision tonight.

To the north of Louisville, Southern Indiana high schools, who have already gone back to school, are also playing fall sports. Including football. With fans in the stands. Of course, it's too early to tell what COVID-19 case will spring up from that. From all indications, spacing and masking has been in place in the stands. But, what about the linemen, or forwards and defenders on the field that are breathing on each other unmasked? 

The vast majority of fall sports are, of course, outdoors. Volleyball, though, in Kentucky can start practice today and begin matches/competition on Sept. 7th. 

It'll be interesting to see how the Jefferson County High School Sports board votes tonight. 

APOLOGIES AND CHANGES

Our platform for posting articles here at Cardinal Couple is Blogger. Blogger recently went through some updates and changes designed to "improve the experience". 

Maybe...

What has happened here on the posting end is that the format has gone to double spacing only, which is annoying and not great for a daily column like ours. Also, pictures and labels have become much harder to add to articles. And, finally, the ability to comment on articles has disappeared, it seems, for many of our readers. 

On Thursday of last week, commenting suddenly stopped functioning for a lot of you. I've gotten e-mails from you and I thank you for letting me know about this function not working for you. I apologize for not jumping on this situation earlier, but, it took me awhile just to figure out how to try and change things in the blogger format and, quite honestly, I'm not sure I understand it yet. 

Gee, I could use an IT guy...

And, I haven't commented in awhile, admittedly, so I don't know if it affects the staff here or not, and, let's be honest, our guys aren't much on commenting to begin with -- but the loss of readers' comments does concern me. And, the staff here is registered to comment under a different category than the "anonymous" commentor....we're registered through Blogger.  

I know, commenting "anonymously" can be trickey with the verifying stuff you have to do...like "how many fire hydrants are there above?" or "choose the automobiles" but we have to have some type of verification/identity procedures here -- otherwise the comments would be over-run by "bots", spammers and sellers. 

So, my request is simple. Would you try to comment today? It doesn't need to be long or eloquent. Just a simple "Interesting article" or "I disagree" or even "Hi guys!"  -- anything, just to see if we can get comments again. I'm no I.T. specialist, so maybe I messed something up in the change-over. 

Thanks for you help.   

paulie