Where’s leadership when you need it?
I ask that question after learning that Marion County High School’s football program elected to pass on an alternate date to play South Pittsburg after the Warriors were forced to cancel last Friday’s game due to a Marion player testing positive for COVID-19.
This isn’t to criticize the original postponement. Any team in any sport that discovers one of its members has tested positive for the coronavirus has a responsibility to quarantine for 14 days, then forfeit if an alternate date can’t be agreed upon.
To do otherwise is to needlessly threaten the lives of not just your opponent, but your own teammates and those teammates’ friends, family and anyone else they may come in contact with. Though certain members of society will argue otherwise, this pandemic is real. We have more than 194,000 American dead to prove it.
But the state’s second oldest prep football rivalry is real, too. And for South Pitt – which has also lost a $15,000 pay day when Red Bank was forced to cancel its game with the Pirates for COVID-19 reasons – losing the Marion game is, at minimum, a $25,000 shortfall.