Limitations Leave Fieldhouse Quiet

The fieldhouse regulations for the winter athletic season have been changed in response to COVID-19 and will limit the number of spectators during Hartford’s home games.

There are five winter sports, all of which were continued this year. However, with winter sports, the majority of them are played inside. Players, coaches, referees, speculators, students: everyone is inside. With COVID-19 still lurking around corners, having a full fieldhouse would only be detrimental to everyone’s health, so precautions were taken for both athletes and the audience members too.

This year, amongst many of the new limitations, Athletic Director Scott Helms and others in the North Shore Conference released a “Protocol and Regulations” document, explaining the new rules regarding the athletic winter season this year.

“With the current COVID-19 pandemic, all parties have worked hard in creating protocols for every winter athletic event,” the Protocol and Regulations document stated.

Players may only bring two family members to athletic games. No students or people outside of an athlete’s immediate family may watch in the fieldhouse and may watch any games or matches via the livestream available HUHS website. All high schools in the North Shore Conference participating in this year's winter sports season will also be following these rules. Though this is the final say, everyone at Hartford wanted more spectators, including the ones who made the decision.

“Mr. Walters and I have consistantly pushed for more specatators at games in facilities where we can still safely social distance them,” Helms said. “We are lucky to have fans at all. I think we need to be grateful for the fact that we are still allowed to have a season and allow 2 immeadiate family memebers attend games.”

While this limit is a blow to most students who see going to these games as part of the high-school experience, the players too feel the loss of a wild student section.

“The audience is the type of people to get us on our feet and actually get us pumped,” basketball player Brooke Lazaris said. She, like many athletes, appreciates the rowdiness of loud crowds and misses the Hartford pride a basketball game’s audience would carry. “The gym’s really quiet and we need someone to get up hyped especially with no student section. We really try to make up for it and cheer extra loud.

Lazaris, like other athletes, enjoys the audience presence, both family and friend filled. The restrictions on the fieldhouse spectators were made out of health concerns, yet all winter sport athletes feel the loss of it’s fans. Whether it empowers performance or keeps teams motivated, a sport’s audience is half of the experience and without it, the game just isn’t the same.

“When people besides your family come I feel like the pressure is greater [I] always try and control everything and give that extra oomph for them to see,” senior gymnast Grace Mccune said. “Knowing that there are people watching you really drives you to go the extra mile to give it their all and then some.”