CAY HILL--The St. Maarten Department of Sports, in collaboration with the St. Maarten Sports Olympics Federation (SMSOF) and the National Sports Institute, are working together to ensure sports reopen on the island in a safe manner.
“We want to reopen sports,” said Jonelle Richardson of the Sports Department. “But we don’t want a coach, trainer or even a sports facility responsible for getting an athlete sick, or worse dying.”
The group has collected data and guidelines from the International Olympic Committee, the Olympic Committee of the Netherlands, health organizations and others to help develop a policy for the use of the island’s sporting facilities. Now the group wants each sports organization wishing to use a facility to develop their own plan as to how their individual sports training will be conducted.
“We expected the schools to reopen early and concentrated our efforts on how they would use the facilities,” explained Richardson.
In some ways school programmes are seen as a bit easier to organize than sports teams. First of all, school groups arrive and leave together. There are no stragglers or parents arriving late to pick up their children. There is time to sanitize the sports equipment before every session and generally the group size is constant.
“Now we are focused on the individual sports returning as soon as June 1. But we are not rushing the reopening.”
The facility guidelines are: Outdoor Sporting Facilities will be open from 8:00am to 8:00pm, until further notice; only outdoor sports are possible, no indoor sports are allowed at this time; no usage of restrooms are allowed, with an exemption for extreme emergency situations; no tournaments and or matches; and lastly practices/trainings must be adapted to adhere to the social distance restriction of 2 metres.
Guidelines have also been established for the athletes. These include: athletes must walk with their own water; athletes must be dressed for practise, no use of changing rooms; no socializing after practise; athletes must leave the practise area upon completion of the training; and athletes who are sick or have symptoms must stay home and call their house doctor or 914 (Covid emergency number).
As of now each sport is asked to develop and submit their individual training plan either to the NSI or sports department.
“There are a lot of things to consider,” said Richardson.
One example given was basketball. Does each athlete use their own ball? What if a ball takes a bad bounce and one of the other athletes grabs it? Does that person have to go wash their hands again? Does the ball have to be sanitized again?
The same applies for baseball and the bats. Does each athlete have their own bat or are shared bats wiped down between players going to the plate?
What about masks? Will the athletes, coaches and trainers wear masks during the training? If not, particularly in the case of children, where will the masks be stored to ensure the right athlete gets his or her mask back?
There has to be a plan for either washing hands or using sanitizer, before, during and after practice. What about food or snacks? Will the sports organization supply the food? Will the athletes wash hands and maintain separation? What is the plan for breaks?
“Some may question the need for all the concern, particularly in light of no new reported cases,” said Richardson. “We have talked with health officials and we know the neighbourhood canvasing found sick people who refused to be tested, so we cannot be sure of the true number of infected people. We just want to be careful.”
