Thomas Breen photo
Wilbur Cross High School shooting guard Christian McClease gets some final practice time in Wednesday after school.
Christian McClease practiced his jump shot in the Wilbur Cross High School gymnasium Wednesday — not in preparation for the night’s scheduled state quarterfinals game in Manchester, but rather to get in a few more minutes on the court at the end of a season suddenly cut short by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
McClease, 14, is a freshman at Wilbur Cross and a point guard and shooting guard on the local public high school’s boys basketball team.
He and his 15 fellow teammates had been planning on driving up to East Catholic High School in Manchester Wednesday night for a quarterfinals match-up in the state’s high school basketball championship tournament.
Those plans were scrapped on Tuesday when the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) canceled the season’s remaining winter sports tournaments, including high school basketball, hockey games, and swim meets, because of a fear of the spread of the coronavirus. The highly contagious virus has infected more than 1,080 people and counting in the United States so far.
On the court at Wilbur Cross.
McClease and three of his teammates joined hundreds of state student athletes, family, and friends in a protest Wednesday morning outside CIAC’s Cheshire headquarters, where they called on the agency to allow for games to proceed, just without any spectators in the audience. That same ask has been made in a Change.org petition, which, as of Thursday afternoon, had 91,088 signatures.
“It’s hurting me a little bit,” McClease said about the sudden cancellation. “It wasn’t the right move.” The team worked too hard to get to where it is in the championship tournament, he said. The seniors on his team who will be graduating this spring deserve a better outcome than this.
CIAC Executive Director Glenn Lungarini said in a Tuesday video-recorded press conference that “the CIAC understands and appreciates the disappointment that student athletes, parents, coaches, and administrators may feel as a result of this decision. However, we must always place the health and safety of our student athletes first.” Local sports writers like Hearst’s Jeff Jacobs have praised CIAC for making the right public safety call, however painful for students affected.
The high school sports tournament cancellation is the latest local disruption caused by the pandemic. Colleges have moved classes online. Conferences have been cancelled last minute. City Hall has been declared a “handshake-free zone.” The governor has declared a state of emergency and has urged residents to stop large community events of more than 100 people.
McClease said that he would like to see CIAC change its outright cancellation to allow for the championship tournament games to proceed with no attendees, and to be recorded or live-streamed for interested viewers.
“We came too far for this,” he said.
Darius Esdaile (pictured), a 17-year-old Wilbur Cross senior and point guard on the school’s boys basketball team, said he would like to see the same.
“We’re still going to school” alongside 1,000 fellow Wilbur Cross students every day, he pointed out. Why can’t a sports game with significantly fewer people in the same room proceed?
He said he recognizes that a pandemnic like the COVID-19 outbreak must inevitably affect everyone’s day-to-day life.
That doesn’t make the hurt of missing out on going to the quarterfinals any less painful.
“We had to show up [at the Cheshire protest] to show that we cared,” he said. And to show solidarity with the hundreds of other student athletes, including those at Hillhouse High School, who will also miss out on playing for the state championship titles in their various sports.
Kevin Walton, the coach of Wilbur Cross’s boys basketball team, praised McClease and Esdaile and two fellow teammates for traveling to Cheshire Wednesday morning to exercise their right to free speech and to publicly protest.
“Life is going to be full of adversities,” Walton said about what he tries to teach the students on his basketball team. “This is out of their control.”
That doesn’t mean students should sacrifice their rights to make their voices heard on this issue.
He said the team finished the regular season 13 — 7, and then went on to win the Southern Connecticut conference championships. “We really liked our chances” for winning tonight’s state quarterfinals game, he said.
Now the kids won’t have a chance to see that hard work pay off.
“It doesn’t seem right to them,” he said. “It doesn’t seem right to me.”
He said that’s an important life lesson.