Youth swim meets across the United States have begun to fall as the latest cancellation victims of the coronavirus.
Earlier today, Junior Olympic championship meets in Southern California, Pacific Coast, and Potomac Valley Swimming LSCs were all cancelled, and now the first announced cancellation of a high school state championship meet has also been announced.
The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), the governing body for high school sports in the state of Connecticut, has cancelled all of its remaining winter sports championships.
Announcement Video:
Glenn Lungarini, the head of the CIAC, said at a press conference on Tuesday that different schools and districts have communicated different levels of restrictions on public gatherings, including several venues that have said they could no longer host events.
“The CIAC, again with always placing the interest of our students first, feel at this time that the best use of membership’s time is to focus on the educational needs of our students. There are a lot of unknowns that still exist about COVID-19 within Connecticut. This has just begun here, and so we don’t know exactly how far this will spread. But when we consider the best action that we can take to address the needs of our schools, we feel that we should give them the opportunity at this point to focus on the educational needs of our students.”
The state of Connecticut has two confirmed cases of coronavirus so far, and local news reports on Tuesday afternoon say that Governor Ned Lamont will declare both a public health emergency and a civil preparedness emergency in response.
While the Connecticut girls’ swimming & diving state champions were held in the fall, the boys’ championships were scheduled to be held over the next 2 weekends, starting with the divisional state championships this weekend and followed by the open state championship on March 19th (diving) and 21st (swimming). Greenwich High School are the defending Class LL and Open champions.
Also being cancelled will be remainder of the boys’ basketball state tournament, the remainder of the girls’ basketball state tournament, and the remainder of the boys ice hockey state tournament. Other winter sports, including wrestling, boys indoor track, and girls gymnastics, have already concluded their championship events.
weird question, but can clubs and high school teams hold private time trials? it’s, to me, absolutely unheard of to just guillotine an entire season to all these very, very unfortunate young souls that won’t have a dire opportunity to post something
Get ready to see a whole lot more of this – The Ivy’s just canceled their basketball tourney, ECAC will be playing some hockey with no spectators with more announcements to come. CT swims their championships at the Wesleyan and Yale pools, so I’m sure they had some input into the recommendation.
Damn shame! I remember watching Kieran Smith swim at the CT State Championships a few years ago and thinking he is the real deal. Hopefully swimmers who were planning to peak at this meet have other opportunities to do so & can still have opportunities to be recruited and stand out.
For those who may be wondering why we’re making such a big deal over relatively few cases, the reason is exponential growth.
Not quite. infectious diseases follow a logistic growth curve. So f(t) = K/(1+A(e^-kt)). Basically it starts by appearing exponential but levels out at a certain carrying capacity.
Anyway, sorry for the unnecessary comment, as you may have been able to discern, I am studying for my calc exam.
Goodnight SwimSwam
I thought about clarifying that, but people are not as familiar with logistic growth. And yea, it appears exponential and then levels off. But we are no where near the leveling off part yet. So the main point to take away is that these cases will grow really really fast.