In her true and oft-demonstrated totalitarian style, Kate Brown has continued her destruction of our kids and their physical and mental health by not permitting our kids to participate in organized sports in Oregon, all under the guise of "keeping everyone safe." This of course, flies in the face of the simple facts that for months, upwards of 30 states have not only had their kids in school, but playing sports - including those dangerous contact sports such as football - for the entire school year. Some Oregon parents and athletes, realizing how important this is, have relocated to other states just so they could play football. However, not all parents and athletes have the ability to do that, so they are stuck.

The inconsistency and hypocrisy of Kate was on display in a recent Oregonian article about the players on the women's basketball team for Bushnell University in Eugene. The article title puts Kate's hypocrisy on display: Oregon’s lower-division college basketball teams wonder why Division I play is deemed safer amid coronavirus pandemic

The last time the Bushnell University women’s basketball players gathered for a game, it was March 12, 2020, and they were in Sioux City, Iowa.

The Beacons had just wrapped up a morning shootaround in preparation for the most anticipated matchup of a special season — an evening date with the University of Antelope Valley in the first round of the NAIA Division II Women’s Basketball National Championship tournament — when devastating news arrived.

The game was off. The tournament was canceled. The coronavirus pandemic, in the early stages of its first surge through the United States, was about to change life forever.

“It’s not the way you want to end a season,” said Chad Meadors, coach of Bushnell, a Eugene school formerly called Northwest Christian. “In the back of our minds, we still can’t help but think about what could have been.”

Ten months later, Bushnell, along with every other lower-division college basketball program in Oregon, is still waiting to play. While Gov. Kate Brown has granted exceptions for Oregon’s four Division I basketball programs to compete during the pandemic, the rest of the state’s programs remain grounded, their sport deemed a “high-risk activity” and unsafe to play as coronavirus cases soar across the United States.

And now the hypocrisy comes into play;

The measure is designed to keep college students and Oregon residents safe and curb the spread of the virus, of course.

Here, I disagree; there are mountains of data and actual experiences showing that kids playing sports has minimal risk at all, and can be done safely, but for Kate, it's all aobut keeping inflated "community infection" rates low so she can look good, but that's for another post.

But for the student-athletes and coaches at Bushnell and the rest of the state’s small schools, they can’t help but wonder why it’s safe for Division I programs to play but unsafe for them.

“It’s been so frustrating,” Bushnell sophomore Aspen Slifka said. “We’re right across the street from UO, literally less than a mile away, and it’s been hard to watch them practice and play. It feels like we are being discriminated against because we’re a small school. And that’s really tough. It’s like our coach says: ‘If it’s safe for some, it’s safe for all.’”

For months, Bushnell administrators and players have been pushing Brown and the Oregon Health Authority for the same rights as their peers at Oregon, Oregon State, Portland State and the University of Portland. But return-to-play proposals submitted in October have been rebuffed or ignored, even though they include regular COVID-19 testing and other enhanced safety measures, and that likely won’t change anytime soon.

And here comes the stonewalling from Brown's office.

“Oregon’s exception for collegiate sports currently applies only to NCAA Division I schools,” Charles Boyle, Brown’s deputy communications director, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a statement. “No other collegiate institutions are eligible to submit protocols to OHA for review at this time.”

So while the state’s largest programs play on, emboldened by influential regional conferences and buoyed by the power of lucrative television contracts, Bushnell and its peers have been relegated to bystanders, forced to watch with envy from the sidelines.

It's a pattern with Brown - no mercy for any small entity - school business, etc - but if you are big and have clout and money, you can get what you want.

The Beacons and the Cascade Collegiate Conference submitted a return-to-play proposal to the OHA on Oct. 8, including enhanced safety measures, regular COVID-19 testing and other protocols similar to those submitted by Oregon’s four Division I schools. The OHA, according to school and conference officials, reviewed the proposal and passed it along to Brown’s office. Weeks passed with no movement and little input. Around this time, UP and PSU ran into similar hurdles with Brown’s office.

On Nov. 13, Brown ordered a statewide holiday “freeze” in hopes of stemming the spread of COVID-19. Nine days later, near the end of the two-week restrictions, Brown granted UP and PSU exceptions to resume all basketball activities and, within days, the schools played their first games. Shortly thereafter, Brown’s office told Cascade officials the state would not be accepting any more return-to-play proposals.

And in her usual pattern of "transparency", she and her office can't even bother to communicate.

Along the way, there was little to no communication from government officials, and, to this day, conference officials don’t know if their safety protocols were adequate or whether their plans were simply ignored.

And like many people, the players do their best to make their voices heard.

The loudest voices in the push to play have come from Slifka and other Bushnell players. They’ve touched base with news organizations and written op-eds pleading their case. They’ve sent letters — and a signed basketball — to Brown asking for clarification. They’ve emailed government officials for information. Slifka even reached out to 12 members of the Oregon House of Representatives who hail from districts that include small colleges to lobby for help. She’s heard back from only two: Raquel Moore-Green and Paul Holvey.

Most recently, Slifka created an online petition, “Calling on Oregon Governor Kate Brown for fairness in Oregon college sports.” The petition has generated more than 1,700 signatures in support.

But Kate, never one for letting facts get in the way of exerting complete control over as many people as possible, doesn't care.

Brown, who did not respond to Bushnell’s signed basketball, has remained unmoved.

And here come the excuses.

“Oregon’s Division I institutions spent weeks in the fall working with the doctors and health experts at the Oregon Health Authority to implement rigorous health and safety standards,” Boyle told The Oregonian/OregonLive in that statement. “COVID-19 is still spreading in our communities, and contact sports remain a high-risk activity according to public health experts. While Oregon’s Division I teams have implemented daily testing, quarantine and isolation protocols, and other health and safety measures that will help mitigate the risk of spreading COVID-19, there is no way to eliminate that risk.

And this is the best part, and shows how she would rather wallow in mass delusional psychosis as compared to real life instances that show sports are safe.

“Governor Brown understands that this is a difficult time for all of Oregon’s athletes, from the youth level to college sports. But to expand Oregon’s sports exception would put more communities at risk.

At risk of what? Catching a disease with a 1% mortality rate, and a 0.003% mortality rate for people under age 20? The cowardice and complete willful ignorance of Kate, Pat Allen, and her cohort is on full display here. Oregon (and Washington) families have been traveling hundreds of miles to Free states (where they have non-communistic governors) to safely play sports for months. I personally have traveled multiple times to Idaho so my son and his team could play in basketball tournaments where 96% of 78 teams were from Oregon and Washington. At one tournament, every team we played was from within two hours travel time of our home, and we all drove at least 6 hours to get to that tournament. Somehow that makes sense, right? And the best was, there were zero COVID issues!

I know of other teams that fly to Arizona regularly, and I know of baseball team that recently went to one of the primary Free states in the Union, Florida, to play in a baseball tournament. As linked above, there are many states that have demonstrated through real life - not worthless studies using data models and other "predictive" tools - that kids playing sports is not an issue with COVID.

And this is on top of the knowledge gained by multiple professional sports organizations that instead of cowering in fear, found a way to keep playing. For instance, according to Dr. Allen Sills, the chief medical officer for the NFL:

Games aren’t spreading the virus. And that’s games, believe it or not, in just about any sport. I’ve been saying for a while that I couldn’t think of a single example of the virus being transmitted on the field, and Sills confirmed that for me.

“We have seen zero evidence of transmission player-to-player on the field, either during games or practices, which I think is an important and powerful statement,” Sills said. “And it also confirms what other sports leagues have found around the world. We regularly communicate with World Rugby, Australian rules football, European soccer leagues. To date, no one has documented a case of player-to-player transmission in a field sporting environment.

Note all of the other leagues that have notice the same thing. Even the NBA has discovered this as well.

In terms of what it would take to suspend a season, the only issue that these officials mentioned was a scenario in which it was found that players were transmitting the virus to one another during games. But the NBA has yet to find evidence of such a scenario, league sources say.

And then comes the gut punch when you see how athletes from other states are allowed to play, even in your state where you can't play.

Perhaps the most humbling part for Bushnell came shortly after Oregon’s Division I programs resumed their seasons and out-of-state teams from the Cascade — including Northwest University and the College of Idaho — traveled to Oregon to play games against UP, Oregon State and Portland State.

“Through all of this, that was one of the more frustrating times, if you will,” said Cashell, who lives in Corvallis. “When we saw NAIA teams from Idaho and Washington, including a couple from our own conference, coming here to play, it was disheartening. It’s impossible to explain to student-athletes in Oregon how that possibly could happen. I don’t think the state really ever imagined that would happen. It’s just an unintended consequence.”

The athletes are trying to do the best they can, but it's hard to do that when there is no rational justification for the restrictions - and the rampant hypocrisy.

But that’s little consolation for Slifka and the women at Bushnell, who had aspirations of returning to Sioux City to finish where they left off last March.

“Aside from the mental health aspect — and that’s big — this is their identity,” Meadors said. “This is what they have chosen to do. For many people, this is about money. The NCAA has to make their money. Well, we’re just little old NAIA and it isn’t about money for us. But it’s still important to our players, and it’s still important to our kids to have an opportunity. It has become more about behaviors and less about money.

“If it’s safe for some, it should be safe for us. If it’s not safe for some, it’s not safe for anybody, and they shouldn’t be playing.”

Welcome to the world of Kate Brown and Patrick Allen, where ideology and ego trump logic and real life.