The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, has been that rare world-shaking event, from its effects on health, economics, and politics to its influence on attitudes, behavior, and wellness. In a particular context, high school sports have also been greatly altered by the coronavirus, as many spring seasons were abbreviated, truncated, or aborted altogether in the wake of the pandemic spread. This chapter seeks to examine the effects of the pandemic on high school coaches and athletes in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a southernmost region comprising four counties on the Texas-Mexico border and about 1.5 million people. The Valley, as it is known, has one of the lowest per capita incomes per region in the United States, and it is an area where high school sports is a very important vehicle for all its participants.
TopIntroduction
Contests of strength, speed, and skill have been a part of human life since the beginning of time, in terms of the impact of physicality on success in hunting and defense/warfare, and also as regards cultural development, competition, socialization, and cohesion. The notion of “play,” according to Johan Huizinga in “Homo Ludens” (1938/1971, p. 5), is an important element of the cultural development not only for youth but for all members of the society.
It has been suggested that play and physicality have always tended to be co-opted into a larger economic framework, i.e., professionalization of these organic tendencies (Michener 1976, 201; Baker, 1982, 32), leading to problematic issues such as gambling, blood doping, and over-reliance on sports, to name a few.
Still, the natural benefits of physical exercise and play are undeniable, particularly applicable in the context of youth. Traditional literature concerning sports is replete with recounting of the positive effects of athletics on young people, including the building of teamwork, sportsmanship, and respect for rules, among others. The stories of American author Burt L. Standish (1903/2008) during the early 20th century, collected into the fabled series featuring the fictional Frank Merriwell as hero and exemplar of good sportsmanship and competition, acts as a prime example of the propagation of ideas through what one might call a “rhetoric of athletics,” in connection to its helpfulness as a socialization and teaching device of the young.
Sports (and fanship) have also often acted as a compelling vehicle for building connections and pride of place, often in a spatial, geographical sense. Benedict Anderson (1983, p. 45) shows how people come to see themselves as part of an imagined community even though they rarely have any contact with others in the group. Anderson’s notions of connection pertain mainly to nationalism but can also be imputed to sports, i.e., school or community spirit. In a nationalistic sense, athletic events play a role in propagating and maintaining national identity, as attested in numerous books about international football – soccer – and its importance to identity, e.g., Ian Hawkey’s 2009 (p. 39) work, “Feet of the Chameleon,” about the sport’s contribution to post-colonial African identity construction.
But what happens when the teaching, learning, and fan support are interrupted, and the exercise and play are curtailed by chance? When the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in the spring of 2020, it eventually caused the cancellation of most of the world’s sporting endeavors, both on a professional and amateur level.
As of September 2020, most American high schools were struggling with how – or even whether – to resume athletic activity on campus, after most spring sports (soccer, baseball, softball, track, for prominent examples) had seen their campaigns postponed, abbreviated, or in many cases canceled altogether. In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, comprising a series of small towns on the Texas-Mexico border, the second wave of the pandemic in mid-summer put this usually obscure area in the international headlines as one of the worst “hot spots” of the virus.
The latest Texas high school football season was thus put into jeopardy because of the rampant outbreak on the border, where communities totaling 1.5 million people suffered some of the highest worldwide percentages of infection and death (Solomon, 2020).
For communities which are often overly dependent on sports for entertainment – the Valley has three of the four poorest counties in the country (Custer, 2015; United States Census Bureau, n.d.) – and in a state where football is sometimes more of a religion than simply a pastime, as reflected in H.G. Bissinger’s (1991) “Friday Night Lights” phenomenon, the end of competitive athletic events was potentially a bigger disaster for participants than for those in other more affluent places with the money and ability to find other pursuits.
The purpose of this research is to analyze the effects of the 2020 suspension of athletic competition in the Valley, focusing on high school-age student-athletes and their coaches, detailing their struggles to come to grips with the abeyance of not only their routines but their dreams. As Michener states in “Sports in America” (1976, p.252), sport has always been an important safety valve for residents in low-income communities, offering the chance to parlay success in games into an elusive college education on one hand, and giving vital feedback in the form of positive self-image, recognition, and increased self-worth on the other, regardless of whether they play at the next level.