A 9-year-old strides toward home plate and takes his place in the batter’s box. Teammates scream out cheers of support not from the dugout, but from the bleachers. A grandmother prepares to watch the upcoming at-bat — on her cell phone.
Ordinarily, youth baseball and softball leagues across Johnson County would be close to wrapping up seasons that started in early April. Obviously, as we’ve all figured out by now, there’s nothing normal about 2020.
But while the COVID-19 outbreak did eliminate sports from our lives in the spring, it appears that there will be action on local diamonds this summer. Youth leagues in most Johnson County communities have been moving forward with plans to play some sort of a season.
It just might look a bit different than you’re used to.
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Even as lockdown measures prevented any organized sports not named golf from being played during the spring months, travel and rec leagues were quietly making plans to throw together a belated season in the summer, provided there were no setbacks with the state’s re-opening plans.
By mid-May, most leagues had at least rough plans in place for what the 2020 season would look like in terms of distancing for players, coaches and fans. With dugout capacity limited to three players, Center Grove Lassie League is putting all of the other players in the bleachers, with the blackout screens behind home plate removed so that fans could watch from there.
Greenwood Little League, which began practices after Memorial Day and plans to open its season on June 27, is positioning players in that space between the dugouts.
Some complexes will need to stagger field use to avoid having crowds at adjacent fields; Greenwood is one of the few where that isn’t expected to be a problem.
"Luckily, the way our fields are set up … there’s a few places where people could be crossing paths, but that’s kind of limited," Greenwood Little League president Clint Jarboe said.
Not every league has made the decision to move forward with a 2020 season; Chris Herrmann of Center Grove Lassie League said that they were receiving more out-of-area requests than usual because other area leagues on Indy’s south side and out in such rural areas as Edgewood were not opening up.
Greater Whiteland Youth Baseball is also not holding a season — though that organization wasn’t planning to do so even before the pandemic due to dwindling numbers.
Those who are moving forward are trying to do so cautiously. Hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes will be plentiful, with dugout areas getting cleaned before and after each game. Concession stand workers will be wearing masks and gloves, and bathrooms will be cleaned more frequently and diligently.
When travel teams started practicing at the Center Grove Lassie League fields after Memorial Day, parents were required to stay in their cars and players’ bags were spread apart around the perimeter of the fields. Those practices, Herrmann said, served as a dry run for the rec league, which began practicing on Monday.
The Center Grove complex also hosted a travel tournament on Sunday, but with a twist — in order to limit the amount of interactions between different teams, guidelines put out by the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA) are temporarily restricting travel tourneys to a round-robin format that sees each team play three games and then leave.
Steps are being taken to limit crowd interaction as much as possible. Jarboe notes that all of Greenwood Little League’s fields are situated in places that enable fans to watch games from their cars. He’s also encouraging parents to live-stream games on social media so that grandparents or other fans considered more at risk don’t feel pressured to come and watch in person.
Similar sentiments are being shared across the board.
"Mostly, I think, it’s self-policing," Herrmann said. "If your kid is remotely not feeling well, just don’t come. If you’re not feeling well, don’t come. If you’re in an at-risk category, don’t come. My wife is definitely one of those; she has a compromised immune system, and so she won’t be coming to my daughter’s travel games."
The restrictions might be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but it’s a far better alternative than not having a season at all. Between Center Grove Youth Baseball, which has started practices for all but its youngest players, and Center Grove Lassie League, more than 1,000 participants are expected this summer.
Not only would scratching the season have taken baseball and softball away from those kids, but it also would have put the leagues in a major financial bind.
"From just a keeping the lights on perspective, last year’s rain in the spring, horrible rain, cost us quite a bit," Herrmann said. "If we were not able to open at all this year, we would have been in serious trouble."
Due to the late start, most leagues are planning to run their seasons past the first day of school and into August. What happens between now and then in terms of the pandemic remains to be seen; numbers have started to flatten out in Indiana over the past few weeks, but they could well surge back up, as they have in several other states.
There may well be some bumps in the road, but leagues will continue trying to navigate those as best they can in an effort to keep their seasons going safely.
"There’s a lot of unknowns," Jarboe said. "We don’t know what’s going to happen today or tomorrow, so we’re just doing as best we can."
