If and when Zach DeWitt and his wife end up having children, it won’t be a surprise to see his computer desktop littered with feeding schedules, nap trackers and spreadsheets listing the couple’s quickest diaper-change times.
Unapologetic nerd. That’s just how Franklin’s girls and boys swim coach rolls.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when DeWitt was faced with the biggest logistical challenge of his coaching career — safely hosting conference and sectional meets during a pandemic — he leaned into it with full force.
Charts and graphs, explanatory videos, the whole nine. No detail was too small. About the only thing DeWitt didn’t meticulously track was how many hours of preparation went into his grand blueprints.
"Who knows? Countless," he said when asked for an estimate. "As somebody who doesn’t have kids, this is my baby."
The winter sports season has been a nasty game of tag, with teams trying — many unsuccessfully — to dodge positive COVID-19 tests and contact-tracing quarantines. With no documented cases of the virus being transmitted at a pool, swimming has almost certainly been the sport least impacted by the pandemic. But that hasn’t stopped DeWitt and other coaches tasked with meet management from being extremely careful.
Unlike many of the schools that will be hosting girls sectionals between Thursday and Saturday, Franklin has the luxury of space — and DeWitt is taking full advantage. There will be no fans allowed at the meet; instead, the bleacher space will be used to spread the competing teams out at safe distances.
The Mid-State Conference meet in mid-January served as a test run for the postseason, and the reviews of DeWitt’s plan were overwhelmingly positive.
"You have enough space for all of the teams, so you’re not going to worry about contact tracing, really, from another school — which is really the biggest part of the process," Greenwood boys coach Ray Onisko said. "We’re dealing with the contact tracing in our own buildings enough as it is, so I think we’ve all got protocols in place to help isolate our own teams, but you always worry coming into a bigger meet how everybody’s going to cross paths, where you’re sitting … and I think this was set up exceptionally well."
The sectional will include a few more teams (10 instead of eight) than the conference meet did, so the plans will change slightly. But not too much; both DeWitt and Franklin athletic director Bill Doty are confident that the game plan is a good one.
With separate staging areas for the championship and consolation finals, detailed travel paths and limitations on how many people can be on the awards podium at once — relay teams send just one representative instead of the whole team — the chances that the virus could be transmitted from one team to another are minute.
"We feel pretty good about the setup," DeWitt said. "There should be no instances of COVID tracing, provided everyone followed the protocols — at least from team to team. What happens within a team, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that."
Doty says he put the planning stage almost entirely in DeWitt’s hands.
"I only gave him some constraints for what we had to do for live stream to make sure our spectators were covered," he said, "(and) to make sure of what we needed to do for the podium and recognize kids — we still wanted to make it fun for the kids, too. So we talked about our constraints with that, not doing diving finals during the meet, and he just ran with how the actual pool setup would be."
With no spectators allowed during the postseason, Doty is placing a high level of importance on the broadcast, which will be handled by the FCTV student crew and faculty director Kevin Hankins.
For the Mid-State meet, Franklin had IU Natatorium announcer Mike Miles calling the meet and multiple cameras set up in the bleachers and around the pool area.
"I don’t know anything about it," Doty said of Hankins’ broadcast. "I just ask him to take care of it, and he wants to put on a first-class show and so that’s why he has such an elaborate setup."
"Elaborate" would be an appropriate word to describe DeWitt’s plans as well. Prior to the conference and sectional meets, he bombarded all of the participating coaches and ADs with an array of email attachments — videos, slideshows and charts — detailing the protocols in place.
He took meticulous notes at some other large-scale meets, including the US Open at the IU Natatorium in November and the OLY Winter Invite in Elkhart in December, and crafted a similar game plan that would fit his own facilities.
This sport — especially this season — is, after all, his baby.
"More than anything, I felt like this season was possibly not going to be able to happen," DeWitt said, "so I’m more than willing to put in extra time to see this thing through for all the kids and all the time that they’ve put into it."
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<p style="text-align: center"><strong>Franklin Sectional</strong></p>
Preliminaries: 5:30 p.m. Thursday
Diving (prelims and finals): 5:30 p.m. Friday
Swimming finals: 1 p.m. Saturday
Teams competing: Center Grove, Franklin, Greenwood, Greenwood Christian, Indian Creek, Whiteland, Martinsville, Mooresville, Owen Valley, Perry Meridian, Roncalli, Southport
Advancement: Swimming event winners and those achieving state cut times will advance to the state meet; top four divers advance to regional.
Attendance: No spectators will be allowed; all sessions will be streamed online at www.ihsaatv.org/MidState/FranklinCommunity
