Sports
Murph's Turf: Athletes stay behind over break

Apr 24, 2008

Unlike many of their classmates, Wilton High athletes were still in town last week. While fellow students spent spring break unwinding on distant beaches, the players on many WHS teams were following their normal routine: going to practices, playing games, staying at home rather than at hotels or resorts.

It was business as usual for the Wilton baseball, softball, boys lacrosse, and girls lacrosse teams, all of which had two or more contests last week. The WHS boys and girls tennis teams each had one match on Monday before getting the rest of the week off, while the boys and girls track teams and the boys golf team had the entire week free.

The break is a source of stress for both coaches and parents. The former worry about losing key players to vacations; the latter wonder why their kids have to stay around and forgo a family trip.

In a sports utopia, Wilton and all the other schools in the FCIAC would take the same week off. There would be no practices, no games, no second thoughts about looking for packages to Aruba. But utopias, of course, are the stuff of dreams and folk songs. With the spring regular season compressed into seven tidy weeks, many teams can’t skip one and still adhere to state rules regarding how many games can be scheduled per week.

Sports such as golf and track have an advantage in that they can schedule contests with more than two teams competing at the same time. Doing so lessens the number of contests per season and allows those teams to often get the full spring break week off. For a while now, the FCIAC’s boys golf coaches have tried to arrange their schedules in order for each team to be idle during its spring break. The teams may still have practices, but they are not mandatory.

In the past, many schools had no official policy about spring break, leaving each head coach to decide what he or she wanted to do. Before the season started, former Wilton High girls tennis coach Bob Jacobs would tell players not to bother trying out for the team if they weren’t going to be around over spring break. In sharp contrast, players on other teams could go away, miss games and practices and suffer no consequences, except for the nasty looks they received when showing off tans to teammates who stayed behind.

While Wilton coaches can no longer kick a player off the team for going away over spring break, they are free to install their own team rules and go over them with players and parents before the season starts. Other schools such as Ridgefield have gone a step further, putting an official policy into their student handbooks. Often, a coach will adopt a one-for-one policy, meaning any player who leaves for spring break must then sit out the same number of games he or she missed while away.

That seems fair. Kicking a kid off the team for going on a family vacation is draconian — after all, this is high school sports and the athletes aren’t being paid and aren’t on scholarship. But allowing players to leave without ramifications isn’t desirable either. That type of lenient policy isn’t fair to the students who stay behind to practice and play games — the ones who get no closer to a tropical getaway than a postcard in the mail.




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