NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The Tennessee Secondary Schools Athletic Association was forced to cancel the state basketball tournaments and its entire spring sports calendar due to the Coronavirus. But the organization wants to make sure no athlete is forgotten.
Bernard Childress is the Executive Director of the TSSAA. He says there isn’t a day that has gone by this spring that he doesn’t think about the state’s high school student-athletes who were unable to finish or, in some cases, even start there seasons.
“Not just athletically, but academically, socially,” Childress said on Newschannel 5+ Sportsline. “Those seniors that lost their seasons also lost their graduations. They lost their opportunities to have prom.”
The decision to postpone the state basketball tournaments in Murfreesboro on March 12th was guided by the direction of local and state health officials, as well as the CDC. The hope at the time was that the tournaments would eventually be able to be completed.
But as the Coronavirus spread throughout the state it became apparent that that would not be possible. So in late March Childress and the TSSAA made the decision to cancel the tournaments along with all spring sports. It was one of the most difficult decisions of his career.
“When you have all these medical professionals who specialize in the disease telling you exactly what you need to do, you just have to make the decision that you’ve got to listen to those people who know exactly what they’re talking about,” Childress said. “But still it doesn’t make that decision easy.”
While many student-athletes mourned the loss of their seasons, Childress knew it was especially tough for the seniors. Only two percent of Tennessee high schoolers go on to play sports in college, so for many athletes the cancelation of the season marked an abrupt end to their athletic careers.
In early April Childress penned an open letter to those seniors, thanking them for their contributions to high school athletics in the state of Tennessee.
“We wanted to tell them how proud we were of them, how proud their parents and the community were of the sacrifices they made,” Childress said. “Not just over the past three years, but especially the sacrifice they made this spring. They don’t understand it now, but maybe 10 years down the road they can look back and realize that the moral obligation that we have to society far outweighs any game. And that’s what high school athletics is all about, is teaching kids to have character and putting someone else before they put themselves.”
