Documenting Governor Kate Brown's horrific handling of the COVID pandemic in Oregon.
On Sunday, January 17th, Portland news station KPTV published an article about football players from Westview High School in Beaverton who relocated to Utah in the fall so they could play football, since Kate, Pat, and Pete Ward from the Oreogn School Activities Association (OSAA) had decided, in spite of mountains of evidence from college, professional sports, and high schools in many other states that playing sports in spite of COVID is perfectly doable.
(KPTV) – Finding a way to safely play: it’s what parents and kids in the Pacific Northwest have been searching for now for quite a few months as the COVID-19 pandemic limits school sports.
In this High School Spotlight, FOX 12 met a group of Westview High School boys who moved to Utah to lace up their cleats and buckle up their chin straps to play football there.
“Man, I miss Oregon so bad. I didn’t realize how much I love Portland until I came here,” Westview HS student Aaron Jones told FOX 12. He has spent the past six months in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
“A big reason why we made the move is because I didn’t play my sophomore year. So, I got hurt the first game of the season, tore my foot. So, I played my freshman year, then I wouldn’t have played sophomore or junior year so I would have missed two years of my high school career and I was like, ‘Man, we cannot let that happen.’”
This is the case for thousands of high school athletes in Oregon this year. Unfortunately, not all have the resources to be able to relocate quickly like these players did, and because the teachers' unions are so willing to just throw away this school year until everything is "perfectly safe" (a utopia that never exists in real life), those students will never regain this lost year.
Aaron’s dad wasn’t having it either. Chris jones played linebacker at BYU 22 years ago and has former Cougar teammates on the coaching staff at Pleasant Grove High School.
“We take sports serious, sports and education seriously,” Aaron said.
Now here's the important part that our fear-mongering "leaders" seem to want to ignore.
“There [were] zero outbreaks or more than five dudes on the team that got it throughout the whole season,” Sam said.
“It was all really outside of schools that it was being spread. In Oregon, we feel like we can do the same thing,” Aaron told FOX 12.
This is something that Pete, Pat, and Kate have continually ignored in their paranoia and pandering to teachers unions - playing sports doesn't spread COVID19. This has been demonstrated in studies from other states such as Wisconsin where sports were actually played, and was even explained by Dr Allen Sills, the NFL's chief medical director:
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.
“Obviously, I don’t think we’re at the point where we’d say it cannot occur, but none of us have seen yet, and that’s certainly encouraging.”
This has also been true for the NBA:
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.
As someone who has been to the Free state of Idaho mulitple times with high school basketball teams over the past few months, I can vouch for the simple fact that playing basketball does not spread COVID.
Eleven games later, Utah was one of 38 states to call a high school sports fall schedule a success.
“I for sure think it could be successful here. We’ve done it. There is no science to it. It can happen. It’s just a matter of getting enough people on board with it,” Darrius shared.
“I see my friends in Oregon wanting to play so bad and I felt bad and I was so grateful I was able to play,” Aaron said.
Masked up on the sidelines and at practice with zero reported on-field COVID-19 transmissions.
Well, I guess even the fantasy that masks help exists in Free states, but at least they got to play.
“They were kind of wishy-washy as far as cases went but I never got corona, no one I was immediately close to got corona, so it was worth it," Darrius said. “The proof is in the pudding. If you want to play football, you make it happen.”
And therein lies the real issue: how important is it to play? For parents and athletes, it is very important, important enough to uproot their lives and relocate for it. However, for Kate Brown, Pat Allen and Pete Ward, these kids, their education, and their sports seasons are disposable, and to be honest not worth the effort to make it happen, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that sports are perfectly safe.