Wildcats quarantined

It’s a 10 letter word that is not good to begin with, but for a football coach in these times, it’s the equivalent of a four-letter word and not to be uttered for fear of bad luck.
Unfortunately for Abbeville High football, it’s a word that’s reared its head as head football coach Roderick Moy is starting to wind down summer workouts and begin preparations for the upcoming football season.
Quarantine.
“We had five kids test positive (for COVID-19)) in the last two days, so obviously there is a problem,” Moy said. “And it didn’t touch just one group of kids to where you could quarantine that group.
“So when you started to contact trace and who was where and with what group between Thursday and Monday, it became obvious that the safest thing was to send everyone home and get healthy and make sure that we start the season.”
So the result is that Abbeville High football has a two-week break for quarantining the football team. When the quarantine period ends, the Wildcats will be starting fall camp as the team gets ready for the fall scrimmage, jamboree, and start of the season.
“It’s not a bad thing is which we are losing games,” Moy said. “The big problem is that we have a process by which we do things, and the day we come back is the first day of (fall) practice.
“So we’re going to have three days of acclimation, and we are going to be behind on our conditioning. These kids are not quarantining from workouts, and we are quarantining so these guys can get healthy, so we don’t infect anyone else. Our conditioning is not going to be anywhere where it would normally have been doing our thing over the next two weeks.”
It’s not the first quarantine situation for Vermilion Parish football. Last year, Erath lost two weeks of the regular season due to quarantine, which ended up costing Abbeville’s game against Erath but it didn’t hurt EHS in the end because a couple of other teams in the state chose not to go into the playoffs and the Bobcats were able to play in the postseason.
Moy characterized it as a streak of bad luck because Abbeville High is following all Covid protocols from the LHSAA.
“We only work out three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday),” Moy said. “But at the same time, we can’t control how much these kids are around each other and other people on their own time.”
Moy added that a handful of kids tested positive and that Abbeville High is not the only place that they were assembling. It could have happened anywhere in the city during the time that they were together.
“But everyone is going to hear Abbeville HIgh and football and quarantine and that it happened in football,” Moy said. “We’re the ones who are going to have to do that right thing and send everyone home whether they have it or not and sometimes the school is going to get a bad rap for something that’s not our fault.”
The AHS coach said that even with this setback, the Wildcats had a good spring and summer and won’t start from scratch when practice starts again, unlike last season when practice couldn’t start until late summer and everyone started from scratch.
“We couldn’t do anything last summer,” Moy said. “No 7-on-7, we couldn’t come together for anything team last summer, whereas we’ve been able to do a lot more this spring and summer, and we got a lot done.”
Moy said the team could come back together on Aug. 9, which is when fall practice can begin for teams with an official spring training period. The Abbeville coach also added that he told the kids who were not affected that there was some conditioning they could do around the house to maintain a level of conditioning, so they are not starting from scratch when the team returns.
If there is one good thing that comes out of this quarantine, it’s the fact that now Moy and the coaching staff have a prime example of following protocols and can tell the kids why you do so because it can come to an end very quickly.
“It’s a perfect wake-up call for us,” Moy said. “I think that people were starting to fool themselves that just because there weren’t as many restrictions as there was last summer, it was back to how life was in 2019, and that’s not the case at all. So we can tell seniors not to take any days for granted because if we get this again, it’s two weeks, and that might be the two games that are the difference between us making the playoffs and not making the playoffs.”