Huntington Beach high school district closes campuses for rest of school year, ending spring sports season
The high school sports season is officially over for Edison, Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Marina, Ocean View and Westminster.
The Huntington Beach Union High School District announced on Thursday that campus closures will continue through the end of the school year in June because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Spring sports seasons in the district have reached an undesirable conclusion as a result, following the path of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District.
Even though the writing was on the wall, area coaches had a tough time digesting the news, especially in thoughtful consideration for their seniors.
One word came to mind for Shelly Luth, who co-coaches the Marina softball team with Dan Hay.
“Ouch,” Luth said of what she felt for her players in light of the season ending.
The Ocean View School District and the Huntington Beach Union High School District will extend their campus closures through the end of the school year in June in response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
The Vikings had shared the Surf League title with Los Alamitos and earned the top seed in the CIF Southern Section Division 2 playoffs last season. Luth was looking forward to another year with senior pitcher Emily Rush in the circle and an influx of young talent behind her.
“I’m sure that every team feels this way, but as coaches, we’re just devastated,” Luth said. “There’s lives at stake here, so you don’t want to sound callous.”
Luth said that she teaches her kids not to let softball define them, but she still worried about kids who might have put all of their eggs into one basket.
“They sacrifice weekends, sleepovers, vacations,” Luth said. “They live and breathe softball, and it’s gone.”
The season’s conclusion was equally difficult to come to terms with for Edison boys’ track and field coach Derek Harrison. The Chargers had been set up well for success on an individual and team level.
In the Surf League opener on March 11, Edison had topped Los Alamitos 72-64 in a battle of the leading contenders for the league title this year.
The quartet of Jack de Bos, Jeff Hass, Wylie Cleugh and Ryan Rivituso had also posted the seventh-best 1,600-meter relay time in the state at 3 minutes 24.68 seconds.
“It was a hard pill to swallow,” Harrison said. “I just feel sorry for the kids because they work so hard. There’s a league championship kind of getting taken away from them, which was a bummer.”
The Chargers use their speed to move past an early miscue, defeating the Griffins 72-64 on Wednesday in a Surf League dual meet at home.
Harrison kept track of what was happening in neighboring districts, and he knew it was only a matter of time before his team suffered a similar fate.
“We just kept hanging on and hanging on, praying and hoping,” Harrison said. “Just talking to other people from other schools and listening to how their schools were shutting down, the Garden Grove League was shutting all their sports down, colleges and NCAA and everybody shutting their sports down, it just didn’t look good for high school.”
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