The dominoes continue to tumble as schools around the North Shore make decisions about fall sports. Peabody is the latest district taking action. Tuesday evening, the Peabody Athletic and Wellness Subcommittee voted unanimously to move ahead with fall sports in the Fall Sports I season.
While the initial vote approved the fall season for hybrid students, the subcommittee also voted to allow remote-learning students to participate. The recommendation still needs to go before the School Committee.
Before the meeting, Peabody Mayor Ted Bettencourt, who also chairs the School Committee, said he feels strongly in favor of having a traditional fall season.
“I see sports as an essential part of your academic and school experience,” Bettencourt said. “It’s the same with the performing arts, which is just as important.”
Earlier, Peabody students and supporters gathered at Higgins Middle School Tuesday evening before the meeting for a “Save Our Season” rally to make their voices heard. Many Tanner student-athletes spoke up during the rally, including several fall sports team captains.
“It was kind of like we got stripped of something we’ve been waiting for for four years,” said senior Amber Kiricoples, a captain of the girls soccer team. “We’re all best friends and we’ve been waiting for this moment to have our senior year and be captains together. We’ve had practices going, we were ready to play and then all of the sudden those were taken away and now it’s everything.”
“There are other leagues around us that get to play,” said Aja Alimonti, another senior captain on the girls soccer team. “I know there are some cities within (the Northeastern Conference) that are hot spots and they physically can’t play. But you wait 12 years of your life to finally be a senior, to finally get recognized for all the hard work you do, and now it’s just kind of taken away.
“I hope the school committee knows to be more sensitive to our feelings,” Alimonti said. “If you were still a high school kid in our shoes, you would 100 percent vote yes. But if you’ve already been through high school, played sports, that part of your life is over for you. We’re about to experience the last part of one of the best four years of our lives. They’re just making these decisions without being sensitive to our feelings.”
“Generally, I think sports is a huge incentive to go to school,” said Kyle Joyce, a junior captain of the boys soccer team. “Waking up at five in the morning just to get to school at 7 a.m., playing or practicing after school is the reason why a lot of people look forward to going. I’m not saying everybody isn’t going to go to school, sports is just a huge incentive.”
Less than two weeks ago, Peabody students participated in another rally — along with other NEC schools — in downtown Danvers to protest the decision by the conference’s principals to postpone fall sports until the “Fall Sports II” season in late February. The NEC principals voted, 9-0-3, to postpone all fall sports.
At the time of that decision, there were five NEC communities — Lynn, Saugus, Salem, Revere and Winthrop — that were designated as red districts that would be forced to postpone all fall sports until Fall Sports II, which is February through April.
However, since then, both Saugus and Salem have moved into the yellow designation that would require a school committee vote on whether to play in September. NEC members Swampscott and Peabody are also designated as yellow, while all the rest — Beverly, Danvers, Gloucester, Masconomet and Marblehead — are designated as either green or unshaded.
Marblehead was the first community to say that it would explore avenues for holding sports in the Fall Sports I season, voting unanimously in a school committee meeting last week to give the principal and athletic director permission to do so. There has been no commitment made by Marblehead to play sports in the Fall Sports I season, only to explore potential ways to safely play this fall.
At the Peabody subcommittee meeting, parent Matt Smith said he has three kids who played or will be playing sports at Peabody High.
“My oldest son just graduated and was a captain of a spring sport,” Smith said. “He said after the spring season was canceled, all he cared about was playing one more game with his uniform, with his team. It doesn’t matter if we play Danvers six times, my kids just want to play. In my house sports is a big part of our household.”