Clancy and Montana City Schools plan to move forward with winter sports, but Boulder Elementary School may opt for intramural boys basketball due to low student participation.
While Montana City passed the motion to start the basketball season on Jan. 2 with little fanfare, the Clancy meeting was more divided, with COVID-19 concerns front and center.
Clancy athletic director and teacher Ryan Fetherston, as well as a group of parents in attendance, championed the sports program as a way to improve students’ mental and physical health. Board member Carrie Lindsay also called for allowing the basketball season to proceed. “My eight grader has had everything taken from her,” Lindsay said tearfully as she voiced support for allowing students some sense of normalcy.
Other trustees, including Chairman Kevin Harris and Trent Jensen, voiced their concerns. Harris stated that he didn’t believe the basketball season was “worth the risk” and because basketball is indoors, and face-to-face without masks, it had more “inherent risks” than the fall sports.
Jensen, who is also an emergency medicine specialist at St. Peter’s, was torn based on his own experiences dealing with COVID-19 first hand.
“I’ve seen the worst of the worst,” Jensen began.
“The ER is overflowing … I get that it doesn’t affect our kids directly, but we are part of a community and if there is one little thing we can do to save a life … telling the wife of a 49-year-old man her husband is dead of COVID is not fun,” he said.
Ultimately, the motion to start the Clancy basketball season was passed 3-2. It was in part due to Jensen’s concerns about starting the season immediately upon return to school after the holidays, which he referred to as a “super-spreader” event. As a result, the Board elected to push the season back by two weeks, but final dates are still be worked out.
The Montana City Board of Trustees voted to allow basketball within the Elkhorn conference, but on the basis that the school does not have to go remote due to COVID-19. Montana City has tentatively set their start date for boys’ basketball as Jan. 2 and it will end before the girls’ season starts on Feb. 16. This, however, may change due to the Clancy Board requesting their boys’ basketball season start two weeks after the holiday break. The Elkhorn conference will only include Clancy, Montana City and East Helena, meaning that a change to one school has the potential to impact the other conference schools.
At the Boulder Elementary School December special Trustees meeting, Superintendent Maria Pace stated that winter sports would not begin until January, but due to a lack of middle school boys they would not participate in the Elkhorn conference. Pace believed there were 5-6 interested students, and therefore a small intramural team or opportunity for open gym practices may be implemented.
If all goes according to plan, boys basketball will run from Jan. 4 to Feb. 9, then girls will follow, from Feb. 16 to March 23, said Pace.
All three boards stipulated that much could change in the coming month as the pandemic evolves, and as such, the season could be postponed or even canceled.
