By JACOB POLACHECK
He never imagined a senior year like this.
It’s a hot summer day in Plano, Texas with temperatures reaching the mid-90’s.
The high-flying left-handed guard strolls into John Paul II gymnasium for his first day of summer practice, eager to get to work with his new squad.
He hurries to find his seat as second-year head coach Dan Lee addresses his team for the first time.
Manny Obaseki and his new teammates learn that due to a statewide mask mandate, players will be required to wear face masks during games this year.
“We’re all like bruh, c’mon now,” Obaseki said.
Questions flood the vast open gym.
How are we going to breathe? Will this affect our eyesight? How will we communicate with each other?
John Paul II, like hundreds of high school basketball teams this year, is tasked with adapting to the new world of high school athletics amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re playing a contact sport, going hard at each other,” Obaseki said. “It makes it that much easier to get someone else sick.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced players, coaches, officials and spectators alike to adjust, doing everything possible to make the 2020-21 high school basketball season a reality. The topic of players wearing masks in-game divided coaches, players, parents and officials, leaving many to wonder when, if ever, it will ever go away.
Mask-wearing is just the latest tweak to the ever-changing game of basketball.
In the 1960’s and 70’s, the NCAA introduced what was known as the ‘Alcindor Rule’, prohibiting dunking in order to prevent basket damage and injuries.
This forced players to adapt, most notably, the rule’s namesake Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem-Abdul Jabbar).
Abdul-Jabbar evolved his game and in turn the game of basketball, putting aside the slam dunk from his basketball arsenal and replacing it with his patented “Sky Hook”, ultimately laying the foundation for one of the most unstoppable moves in basketball history. In the late 1970’s, the NBA introduced the three-point shot, stretching the court and ushering in the next great era of NBA sharpshooters from Larry Bird to Reggie Miller.
While masking may not have the same on-court implications as these rule changes, it’s certainly impacted the game.
“I feel like this masking situation is going to be around for a long time just because of how much of an impact it has,” Obaseki said.
Take Bryce Hopkins, a senior at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois. This season, he and his teammates lost in an overtime battle against Notre Dame High School.
With the score tied at 68, Notre Dame’s Louis Lesmond hit a shot from 60-feet out at the buzzer.
“That was probably one of the harder games for us to play,” Hopkins said. “We played a lot of minutes, we went into overtime, along with having the mask on. It was a lot.”
Given such implications, not everyone is ready to fully embrace the new mask wearing mandates.
Travel northeast to St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island and you’ll find Taylor Bol Bowen, a 6-foot-8 sophomore forward who has his doubts about in-game masking.
“People think that it protects us,” Bowen said. “In reality, we’re sweating on each other and we’re so close to each other at all times that it’s kind of redundant to be wearing a mask.”
Despite being one of the nation’s best high school basketball players, no previous basketball experience could have prepared him for this.
“I was obviously a little bit disappointed because of how you play basketball,” Bowen said. “It’s all in your face, you get sweat in it and it’s so hard to breathe.”
Bowen’s experience with masking this season has ranged from annoying to downright nasty, striding up and down the court in a sweat-drenched mask. If those challenges weren’t enough, Bowen has also had his fair share of problems when it comes to the officials regulating mask-wearing.
“The refs will give me a warning or kick me out of the game sometimes just for having my mask below my nose,” he said. “We’re sweating on each other and it was just a little bit out of pocket because the mask is just underneath your nose.”
Even as a spectator, the high school basketball viewing experience has changed dramatically over the past year.
Just last season, high school arenas were packed with fans, students, family members and scouts alike. But this year, venues have been forced to limit attendance due to the pandemic.
Look around the gym — players, coaches, officials, fans and media — it doesn’t matter. Everyone is masked.
Take a trip to Byron Senior High School in Byron, Minnesota, and you’ll find one of the many high schools that have drastically changed its guidelines for spectators.
Among the spectators are Rob and Indie Lee, parents of junior forward Ahjany Lee.
“Going from full gyms with concession stands where parents, family members, student body, school band and community members could all attend, to having restrictions put in place,” Rob and Indie said by direct message via their joint Twitter account.
“That took away the element of camaraderie and energy that everyone looked forward to.”
The new restrictions also made it more difficult for those in the crowd to read facial expressions, an aspect of the viewing experience eliminated this season.
That’s not to say these changes have been all negative.
“I will say the pandemic forced venues to be more creative, such as displaying fan posters,” Rob and Indie said. “Players and teams could still feel they were being supported by their fans and community.”
But this story extends further than just the changes within the arena.
After every game, Lee returns home and washes his mask like he would with any other part of his uniform.
“Laundry is a never-ending chore with teenagers,” Rob and Indie said. “You learn quick with having teenagers, to have them bring extra masks with them in the event they misplace or forget theirs.”
Players and officials aren’t the only ones affected by the mask wearing mandate. The willingness of referees to eject a player for wearing a mask incorrectly has placed an additional role on coaches.
At Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas, coaches have even come up with a title for their newfound responsibility: The Mask Police.
“That’s been the biggest struggle,” Lawrence High School head boys basketball coach Mike Lewis said. “Requiring the kids to put it over their nose and around their chin for 32 minutes of basketball.
“It’s much easier said than done.”
Just five miles away at Lawrence Free State High School, head boys basketball coach Sam Stroh expresses a similar sentiment.
“All of our coaches have (an added responsibility) from temperature checks and making sure guys are following the protocols,” he said.
Both Lawrence High School and Free State High School are located in Douglas County, which like many counties, has in place a mask mandate, requiring a face covering in any public space.
“We’re wearing a mask each day of practice and every home game,” Lewis said. “Our opponents are also required to wear a mask when they come to play us.”
But once Lawrence High hits the road for an away game, the team is permitted to play by the rules of the opponent.
“The choice with our program is just to play by the county rules,” Lewis said. “But our kids always have the right to wear a mask if they choose to.”
Sometimes these responsibilities fall on more than just the coaches.
Out in White Plains, N.Y., Michael O’Donnell, the athletic director at Archbishop Stepinac High School has seen his duties multiplied amidst the pandemic.
“There’s a constant problem of me having to tell them to pull up their masks and social distance,” O’Donnell said. “It’s every moment of every day.”
Like Lawrence High and Free State, Archbishop Stepinac is required by state and county health department rules to enforce mask wearing among high school athletes.
“It was a very difficult job for coaches,” O’Donnell said. “They want to coach, not babysit kids. Sometimes they would relax, but (would) always needed to be reminded.”
Meanwhile, if you head down to Maret School in Washington D.C., you’ll find a boys basketball program that took the initiative upon themselves to enforce mask wearing guidelines, despite no such rules from the county.
For a team like this, playing in a league where masks aren’t required, it was rare to face an opponent wearing masks at all.
“Opponents never wore masks because they didn’t require it,” Maret senior guard Quincy Allen said. “Most of the time, we were going against teams that weren’t wearing masks unless one of the players was wearing it on their own.”
For schools, it’s more than just a decision on whether or not to require a mask.
Once the decision is made, many programs will have to decide whether to require cloth masks, disposable masks or leave it up to the players.
“Some of us were wearing disposable ones,” Allen said. “I wore a cloth one while some of my teammates wore the ones you could put around your neck.”
Meanwhile at Free State, Stroh takes great pride in his team’s unity on the mask wearing front.
“We’re Team Adidas,” he said. “We’ve got the Adidas masks going. We’ve had a few lose theirs here and there, but we’ve tried to look like a team when wearing the masks.”
It’s been 10 months since that hot summer day in Plano, Texas.
Obaseki is no longer dumbfounded by the concept of wearing a mask during a game, instead, he’s now teaching others the ropes.
“It’s kind of sad that I’m still saying this, but you have to wear it the right way,” he said. You can’t wear it a certain way or the way you feel most comfortable and think it’s going to help everybody else.
“You’ve got to wear it the right way and make sure, even when you’re off the court, just keep it on just for safety reasons, especially if you’re around others.”
And for Stroh, well he doesn’t expect the tales of mask wearing in high school basketball to go away anytime soon.
“I think it’s obviously a story that will last forever,” Stroh said. “People will have pictures and stories written about it, the things that we did to overcome and hopefully prevent the spread.”
This story was completed as part of a bigger story for the Kansas COVID Project in which University of Kansas students set out to understand how COVID-19 impacted sports.
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