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Playing it safe: Area schools taking precautions to combat H1N1
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By Brian Eller -- beller@nvdaily.com
During a routine practice earlier this month, a Warren County football player went down with a knee injury. It was just a minor injury, but one that was going to require a visit to the doctor.
More than 48 hours later, the player still hadn't been to the doctor.
It wasn't a refusal on his part, nor was it the local doctor telling him he'd be fine. The doctor simply had no time to see the patient.
That's because over the past few months, local doctors and team trainers have been working overtime. With several cases of the H1N1 virus, more commonly known as swine flu, spreading through the schools, the daily routines of students, teachers and parents have changed.
No longer is it all right to share a bottle of water, or to go all day without washing your hands. Hand sanitizers are sprouting up in the schools each day, while school officials are taking precautions to prevent further spread of the disease. Even President Obama has acknowledged its severity, declaring swine flu a national emergency.
While the outbreak has garnered the attention of the entire country, the illness is certainly nothing new -- the first case was reported back in 1998 -- but today it's nationwide, and the cities and towns in the Northern Shenandoah Valley are not immune.
Several area athletes have been battling illness throughout the season. Locally, games have been postponed or even canceled to accommodate teams that are so depleted they cannot compete. Coaches are forced to balance their duties of winning on the court or on the field, while more importantly keeping their players safe.
But maybe the scariest factor is how easily the illness can be spread. Whether it's during a game or practice, or even in the locker room, the likelihood of contracting the flu is becoming unsettling.
It's difficult to pinpoint where or when the local outbreak began. It seems every week there is a new school or team that is dealing with the illness. At Millbrook High School, football coach Reed Prosser said a number of players came down with some sort of bug, but with a break in his team's schedule, they weren't forced to make any drastic changes to the team.
"We had a fair amount of kids that were sick," Prosser said, "but fortunately for us, it was during our bye week. I know a lot of the local teams have had kids out of practice the last couple of weeks. Fortunately for us, we were kind of the team that, I guess, it happened to first."
At Stonewall Jackson, several players on the varsity volleyball team came down with the flu, preventing the team from being at full strength for practices and games. Coach Sophia Stout had to begin a daily routine of looking at the school's attendance sheets to see who was out of school that day. The roster became so depleted, Stout had to call up players from the junior varsity squad to fill in while her players recovered and even had to reschedule a match due to the outbreak.
"Every year in school, you have kids out for something," Stout said. "You have kids that have colds, but I'd say this year is the first time I remember having to move a game. I know at Luray I had kids that were feverish and you feel really bad about it. At that point you think, 'Gosh, we shouldn't even be here.'"
Stout said as of Monday she was back to a "full team," but that didn't mean everyone was at 100 percent. In order to prevent more outbreaks, Stout has taken it upon herself to make sure the team's equipment is as clean as possible, and to make sure her girls are being more careful.
"Well, we went out and purchased hand sanitizers," Stout said. "With the girls getting water, we had to have hand sanitizers because they would be right on top of the water bottles. I spray their bags every day. I spray the net, too. I spray everything down. It might be a bit much, and believe it or not my varsity players laugh about it, but they're moving it through classrooms and to our away games and it's necessary."
While the precautions may seem unnecessary or even comical, it's nothing compared to some other, more bizarre precautions being taken in the sporting world. In England, a memo was recently issued discouraging soccer players from spitting on each other during games, a common occurrence overseas, in order to prevent spread of the disease.
Here in the Northern Shenandoah Valley, however, no team has been affected by the flu more than Warren County's football team. Wildcats coach Tony Tallent regularly conducts practice with as many as eight or nine players absent with some type of illness, whether a cold or a variation of the flu. It has put a strain on the coaching staff's weekly game plans, and with so many players contracting the virus, Tallent said sometimes he's not sure who will be able to suit up on game day.
"We absolutely game-plan around who might make this game or not," Tallent said. "It's a daily thing. We've really emphasized that the kids take showers and make sure they're not sharing anything. We had a locker check earlier to make sure there wasn't clothing that had been sitting there for a long time. We've really been cognizant of the kids that have had flu-like symptoms have gotten checked out."
With doctors seemingly bogged down tending to the swine flu outbreaks, the trainers for each team have become extremely busy caring for each individual who requires attention. Tallent said at the first sign of a player looking fatigued or feeling ill, he is immediately sent to the trainer for evaluation, leaving the team's medical staff with no shortage of players to try and determine the severity of their conditions.
The coaches are not alone in their efforts. Each school in the area is taking its own approaches to combating the spread of the flu. Along with setting up hand sanitizers, schools have issued instructions to its faculty members on how to keep students healthy.
Even the Virginia High School League is taking initiative.
In an advisory sent out on Oct. 14, the VHSL detailed recommendations for coaches, event organizers and parents, as well as what to do in order to reschedule a team contest.
"Our role is simply to send out these recommendations," said Mike McCall, the VHSL's information and communications specialist. "We encourage the schools to come up with guidelines to be aware of and we just try to give some information and guidelines for them."
So far only a handful of contests have had to be postponed due to the flu outbreak, but school officials and coaches aren't taking any chances when it comes to keeping the spread of the flu to a minimum. Tallent said the best thing he can do is be cautious -- and hope it doesn't come down to game cancellations.
"Obviously the school is extra-cautious right now," he said. "At the first sign of any flu-like symptoms, our kids have been sent home. Worst-case scenario is you would have a school shutdown for a particular amount of time that was on your schedule, and that duration could affect your preparations for the next game."
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