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Over the course of the many months, since March of 2020, high school sports in Illinois and the entire country have had to adapt and remain flexible to an ever changing environment due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Throughout the country high school sports associations have collaborated with state officials to offer student-athletes opportunities to engage in the extracurricular activities they love, and have trained for throughout their high school years. Those collaborations have allowed students to hold on to some semblance of normalcy during the most chaotic period of their young adult lives. Everywhere except Illinois. 

In Illinois, Illinois High School Association officials and members of the Illinois Department of Public Health and Governor J.B. Pritzker's office has all shown immense failures in leadership. Mistakes and miscalculations have led to petty bickering through the press and failed to produce a cohesive plan, all while harming student-athletes that mitigations and  guidance is “supposedly enacted to protect”. While the past cannot be rewritten or regrets undone, there is still time left in the 2020-21 school year to provide student-athletes meaningful extracurricular experiences. Those who have signed and publicized this petition, coaches, players, parents, and supporters would request the IHSA, IDPH and JB Pritzker to do the following: 

Publicly apologize through a joint statement to student- athletes throughout the state of Illinois for the mismanagement of this situation. At the bare minimum, the lack of consistent communication and a cohesive plan had created an unnecessary atmosphere of anxiety, depression and fear, that is not a result of COVID-19, but a failure in leadership. 

1. Establish a set of safety mitigations, specific to each offered activity through the IHSA, that will protect student-athletes, coaches, parents, officials, and event workers to the best of your ability. 
   Revise and publish a new calendar of extracurricular activities grounded in the following principles:
   
   
2. Assign all sports, regardless of their traditional season assignment (fall, winter, or spring), to a time in the calendar that gives each of them the best opportunity to be conducted in a safe and meaningful manner. 
3. Provide all students with an opportunity to participate in at least one sport during this school year, even if sports conflict with one another. While some sports were completed in the fall, students may not participated in those sports, and the possibility of canceling sports in January strips them of a chance to participate.

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