Community Members Step Up To Keep MVHS Football In The Game

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

The Moapa Valley High School Football team finally returned to official competition on Friday night against Faith Lutheran. That return, in an of itself is a good news story for the athletes who have been waiting months in hopes of some semblance of a football season.

But getting the season underway has not been easy. The MVHS team has had to blaze a trail through conflicting regulations and red tape, just to be able to compete on the field.

In recent weeks, the process has bogged down to the point of threatening whether the team would be able to play at all. And if not for the intervention of community members, there would likely be no football season this year.

For example, in mid-February the Nevada Governor’s office announced that contact sports like football could be played in the state. A few days after that, the NIAA released an extensive list of health guidelines and mandates which had to be followed by all competing teams. One of these guidelines was a rigorous COVID testing requirement.

All athletes and coaches of full-contact sports like football were required to be tested for COVID every week during the season, starting at what was termed in the regulations as “first contact.” But the MVHS team ran into problems with this requirement right out of the gate.

“There was a misinterpretation on how the school district read the (‘first contact’ requirement), compared to the interpretation from the NIAA,” explained MVHS Head Football Coach Brent Lewis.

The NIAA documents seemed clear that the requirement meant for testing to start before the first game was played. But the CCSD interpreted it to mean that testing was required before the athletes start putting on shoulder pads in practice.
“So that basically froze us up so that we couldn’t even start practicing,” Lewis said.

The problem was that the CCSD had made no plans to start testing the athletes. The district has contracted with a company to administer regular tests to teachers in the return back to the classroom. But that contractor could not test student athletes because the district had not arranged for the contractor personnel to go through required FBI background checks to do so.

“So here we are, cleared to start practicing only if we have tests,” Lewis said. “The district was supposed to provide the testing for us to do that. But there was no testing available for us. We couldn’t practice until either they tested us or just let us practice. And they wouldn’t let us practice.”

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. The NIAA requires at least ten days of practice before a team can compete on the field. If practice time is delayed, then the team can be ineligible to play. And missing even one game in a five-week season is a heartbreaker for the young athletes.

“It has been frustrating because it just hurts the kids,” Lewis said. “There are all of these protocols and regulations that you have to adhere to creating huge obstacles. And, you know, the kids don’t care. They just want to play.”

It wasn’t until community members got involved that things started to move. As the deadline approached when the team would have to start practicing or begin forfeiting games, local parents started to mobilize.

On Thursday, Feb. 25, the day of that deadline, Logandale residents Kyle Heiselbetz and John Hymas scheduled a meeting with County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick to address the issue. Kirkpatrick’s response was immediate.

“We met with her at 7 am and explained what was going on and she got on the phone right there during the meeting to get things done,” Heiselbetz said.

Within a few minutes Kirkpatrick had procured 80 COVID test kits from the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD). She then contacted Moapa Valley Fire District (MVFD) Chief Steven Neel requesting that he come to Las Vegas and pick up the kits and deliver them to the community.

Because there is strict tracking on the test kits, they could only be released into the hands of an official who is trained to administer them. So it needed to be Neel that picked them up.

“That Thursday was my day off and we were celebrating my wife’s birthday, too,” Neel said. “But I just thought: this is our football season in Moapa Valley. We need our kids back to playing and back to sports. So I went in town and picked up the tests and brought them back.”

Neel delivered them to the Logandale Quick Care into the hands of Physician’s Assistant Andy Rose. The parents had arranged with Rose and his team to administer the vaccines to the team that afternoon. All of those tested came out negative.

“So we had the conversation with Marilyn at 7 am and by 3:00 that afternoon, the kids were vaccinated and on the practice field,” Heiselbetz said.

Since that time, Neel has had to make two other similar trips into Las Vegas to pick up testing kits for the team.

Rather than the team all showing up at the Logandale Quick Care, Rose and his team has come to the school to administer the tests over the past few weeks.

CCSD administrators have told Coach Lewis that they are now ready to take over testing starting this week. But Neel said that he had procured enough tests to take care of the team for the rest of the season if necessary.

“We don’t know what they’ll be able to provide,” Neel said of the CCSD. “So we have them here in reserve, just in case we need a backup.”

Coach Lewis expressed appreciation to community members, to Chief Neel and to Commissioner Kirkpatrick for stepping up and cutting through the red tape so that the team could start its season.

“To me, this whole episode is proof of how bureaucracy is just an obstacle to real life,” Lewis said. “If they would just step out of the way and let the communities lead out; I mean, as soon as we got community members involved, that is when things started happening.”