So Now We Know - IHSA Approves Modified Schedule for 2020/21

It's been a very busy day news wise for the Illinois High School Association as well as IHSA schools, staff, coaches players and parents. Now everyone has the modified schedule for the upcoming year.

The news cycle started at noon today when Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker announced the release of the "All Sports Policy" regarding sports in Illinois. This new policy will be "restricting youth and adult recreational organized sports,". This will not affect professional or college sports.

The All Sports Policy breaks each sport down in the risk categories, high, medium and low Risk. It then outlines four different levels of play ranging from no-contact practices in level 1 to tourneys and out of conference play in level 4.

But the question everyone had was what will the sports schedule look like?

At 2:00 pm today, the IHSA was to release their modified schedule at on the IHSA.org website. Turns out there was so much traffic to the site at the release time, the website crashed. But after a while, the following schedule was release in a press release. The schedule looks like this:

In the video below, I had a chance to talk to Carterville Lions Athletic Director and head football coach Brett Dial about today's developments.

Let's just hope that things can proceed toward fulfilling this new schedule and not have any setbacks at a later time.

Will We Know The Fate of Fall Sports In Illinois On Wednesday?

Carterville Lions at work during summer workouts. July 2020

This past Friday the IHSA met with the IDPH, ISBE and the Govornor's Office to hopefully work out the details on return-to-play of sports in Illinois. There is a meeting of the IHSA board scheduled for this Wednesday to provide an update of the fall sports season.

Will there be fall sports in Illinois this year? Personally, I don't believe there will be.

Illinois is one of eight states that the sports season is still in limbo.

In this article from Maxprep this afternoon, there are currently 37 states that plan to play this fall as of now.

Will there be another delay on a final decision? I guess we will find out on Wednesday...supposedly.

Will there be another delay on a final decision? I guess we will find out on Wednesday...supposedly.

Just let everyone know one way or the other.

Again, we should probably know more from the IHSA coming up tomorrow.

Salukis Pick Up Game at Kansas August 29th

I figure I'm like most people in that I'm really missing sports. It's been great to watch the NASCAR races since they started, along with the PGA golf. Now we are starting to see MLB games since they started this past . And this week we finally get to see the St. Louis Blues start the defend their Stanley Cup Championship.

But it's the local stuff that I'm truly missing. What about you?

Since the IHSA has deferred the decision making on high school sports season the IDPH and Governor Pritzker, there was finally good news from SIU.

On Saturday, the Salukis announced that they have scheduled a game on August 29th at Kansas in Lawrence, KS. This game replaces the game that was lost due to COVID19 at Wisconsin.

This was just enough to give me a glimmer of hope that we "might" see Coach Nick Hill and the Saluki's take the field this year.

Saluki Hall of Fame Broadcaster Mike Reis sat down with Head Coach Nick Hill to talk about the newly scheduled game and how the Dawgs are preparing with so many restrictions in place. You can watch the interview here courtesy of SIUSalukis.tv

Let's hope the season actually take place.