by Peyton Blumenfeld ‘22

Over these past two years, winter sports have gotten the short end of the stick, especially the swim and dive team. In 2020, there was no season at all, and this year, meets are either getting canceled or there are no spectators allowed.

New MCPS Covid-19 protocols following the spike in cases over the break have made it so that if there are three or more cases of Covid-19 on a winter sports team, then that sport will be canceled for two weeks. This is unfair because other winter sports such as basketball have significantly fewer members than the swim and dive team, which has about 50 student-athletes on the team. The probability of three people getting Covid-19 out of 50 is much higher than three people getting it out of 15. And if they cancel swimming and diving, it’s not just one team that gets the boot. It includes the girls and boys swim team, and the girls and boys dive team, which are four whole separate teams.

To make this system more fair, the threshold for canceling the sport should be based on the percentage of students who have tested positive, not the number of cases. The swim and dive team has already had to cancel one of their meets due to the number of Covid-19 cases. Granted, it is rescheduled at the end of the season but who knows how many cases the team will have by that point.