The savory smell of chicken roasting on a spit wafted through the air outside Mount Jordan Middle School. On a stretch of grass just below the school, in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains and yet blanketed by sunshine on an unusually warm Halloween afternoon, about a thousand people milled about.
Their attention was on one of the three smaller fields where divisions of the Ute Conference youth football championships were playing out. The same scene could be found at two other fields around the valley. Games — 40 in all — had been going since 9 that morning.
Of course the tempting smell of the food-truck chicken found its way into the nostrils of the family and fans gathered along the sidelines and the players and coaches on the fields. Yet, at least through the final day of play, the coronavirus mostly had not.
During a season that stretched 11 weeks from August until the last day of October, the league’s 6,000 kids played about 1,500 total football games. In that span, just 30 tested positive for COVID-19.
“I just feel so blessed,” said Jeff Gorringe, the conference’s lead administrator, “to have had the season we had going in under such difficult circumstances.”
To put the Ute Conference’s achievement in perspective, consider that USA Football — the sport’s national governing body — reports that 60% of youth football programs didn’t play in 2020 because of the virus. Also consider that within days of the league’s July 5 start of training, college football programs began canceling their fall seasons. The Ivy League went first, but others quickly followed suit. They included the Pac-12 and the Big Ten, both Power 5 conferences, which halted all fall sports.
Many eventually changed their stances and allowed for fall play. But that came only after they could offer daily or near-daily antigen tests. Even then, they stuck to abbreviated conference-only schedules expected to last no more than 10 weeks.
The Ute Conference, on the other hand, pulled off a longer season with no rapid testing at its disposal. And it did it while working with a bunch of 7- to 14-year-old boys.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Fans and family sit along the sideline of a Ute Conference Pee-Wee football championship game between Hunter and Olympus Gray at Mount Jordan Middle School on Oct. 31, 2020. The championships, held at three sites, drew thousands of fans and were the culmination of an 11-week season. Only 40% of USA Football youth football conferences offered seasons for 7- to 14-year-olds in 2020.
The largest of five youth football leagues in the state, the Ute Conference adhered closely to the protocols set out in USA Football’s Return to Youth Football 2020 Guidelines. Measures included holding film sessions outside, eliminating team parties, refraining from practicing until three days after a game to ensure no one is sick and mandating coaches wear masks at all times.
Yet Gorringe said the league’s success hinged on being open to making changes as issues arose. And they inevitably did.
“We’ve tried to be extremely proactive in our approach to the season,” Gorringe said. “I mean, all season our mantra has been ‘Fluid and flexible.’”
So, when a coach called him in tears because he had come in contact with the coronavirus and he was afraid that his quarantine would cost his players their unbeaten season, Gorringe had an answer. This season, teams would be seeded into the playoffs based on their winning percentage, not their record. Furthermore, a game canceled because of COVID wouldn’t go down as a forfeit, which might incentivize players or parents to conceal a positive test. Rather, it would be as if it was never scheduled at all.
In all, seven games were canceled this season, Gorringe said.
Gorringe also gave a lion’s share of the credit to the parents. They not only kept their kids home when sick, they pushed the conference to have a season in the first place.
After canceling its flag football and 7-on-7 leagues in the spring, the conference sent out three separate surveys to parents asking them about their interest in signing up for a summer session. Seven percent said they wouldn’t participate no matter what. The rest were open to the idea.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Crowds watch Hunter take on Olympus Gray during a Pee-Wee youth football game at Mount Jordan Middle School on Oct. 31, 2020. The game, one of 40 championships, was the culmination of the Ute Conference's 11-week season.
“We took the position that, OK, we don’t want to force anybody to play,” said Gorringe, who added that enrollment dropped 8% from 2019. “But if 93% of our parents are saying they want their kids to play, we’ve got to provide an avenue for them to play.”
Preston Hansen of Holladay is one such parent. His 11-year-old son, Jude, hadn’t played football prior to this season. When he wanted to join his friends on the Olympus team, the family had some concerns. But Hansen’s other children were playing sports and Jude was also signed up for baseball — which ended up being canceled. They felt if they were otherwise careful, the risk would be a good exchange for a sense of normalcy.
“It’s a tough mix of how do we try to present the world as continuing and not [have] too much disruption in routine but also set a good example,” Hansen said from behind a mask while sitting in a lawn chair along one field’s sideline. “So it’s kind of a day by day thing.”
Having teammates to whom they must answer might actually deter kids from participating in behavior that could put them at risk of catching the virus. That’s according to Dr. Michael Koester, the chair of the National Federation of State High School Association’s sports medicine advisory committee and one of the contributors to USA Football’s playbook for youth football.
Koester said that accountability plus the timing of the season and the reduced likelihood of young children to transmit COVID-19 probably all played a role in the Ute Conference’s success.
“I think that there’s several factors,” Koester said. "One is that testing was just never an expectation. Everybody knew they were going to have to do it without testing. Subconsciously that may have led coaches and players to being a little more careful.
“But also, without the specter of testing, there was also the expectation going in that ... if you had kids get an outbreak, then you’re going to forfeit a game or two. And that was really baked into the cake for high school and youth sports.”
Plus, Gorringe said, the league upped the ante by implementing a mid-season reset this year. After five weeks, each team was reevaluated and matched up with teams of more similar skill levels for the final three weeks of the regular season. That breathed new life into teams with dismal starts to the season, one of which started 0-4 but ended the season with a championship. It also made games closer, bringing last year’s average 20-point differential down to five points in regular-season play. As a result, kids were more invested in their teams.
The league made its own adjustment late in the season as well. With cases beginning to rise in early October, the board opted to cut the season. The decision to end on Halloween was controversial, especially since the league had already arranged to hold the game in high school stadiums Gorringe said. But, it was necessary.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Fans gather to watch a Ute Conference youth football championship game at Mount Jordan Middle School on Oct. 31, 2020. Conference administrators credit the actions of parents for its ability to hold an 11-week season with very few COVID-19 disruptions.
“We’ve had a good year. We’ve had a great year,” Gorringe said. “Let’s not put the government or anybody in position to have to say, ‘Hey, when are you guys ending?’ Let’s be proactive. ... We want to be part of the solution, but provide this opportunity for the kids.”
Still, the Ute Conference’s decision to play during a pandemic has aggravated some. A commenter on a private educational message board accused the league of putting teachers' lives at risk. Some parents have complained the conference is, by extension, killing people by allowing a full-contact sport at a time when contagious disease experts have advised social distancing.
Koester acknowledged that playing sports isn’t the safest thing to do during the pandemic, but he said not allowing kids to do anything also carries its own issues.
“It’s a balance of risk. Sports participation itself is a balance of risk,” he said. “You could tear your ACL. But we don’t accept it as a, you know, a zero-risk thing and don’t want people not doing anything. So, I think that going into it, there were some unknowns, but it appeared to me that there is going to be a low risk. And I think at this point in those states and leagues that have been successful, I’m not surprised that people have been able to do this without seeing a large number of infections.”
The risks sat heavily on the mind of Jana Lavulo of Saratoga Springs as she contemplated letting her three boys play football with the Ute Conference. The boys, ages 9, 11 and 13 and her husband are all at high risk for having complications if they catch the virus, so she wasn’t thrilled with the idea. But, her husband is a coach and he and her kids love football. So, she didn’t stand in their way.
As she left the Mount Jordan field with her oldest son, Machai, she looked exhausted. It may have been linked to a day in the sun watching football alongside a thousand other people, only about half of whom were wearing masks. Or, it may have been the result of an entire season of worrying for her family’s health.
Still, she said she’s made peace with letting her kids play. She was satisfied with the precautions the Ute Conference took and with parents' actions. And next year she’ll let them do it again.
“I needed to get them out. We all needed to get out,” she said. “So it’s masks, masks, masks and sanitize, sanitize, sanitize.”
