TCCGRIZ said:
Well so far here in Washington, it has been deemed Constitutional and upheld. And multiple business have said that after conferring with a lawyer, the odds of winning were very small.
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(Not Football) But this crap has to stop before GRIZ Football season!
- Thread starter grizindabox
- Start date
Well so far here in Washington, it has been deemed Constitutional and upheld. And multiple business have said that after conferring with a lawyer, the odds of winning were very small.
Maybe find another county to play in.
Here is some new tidbits to start the week. Spokane County has determined that 40% of new cases in the county are Community spread. In Oregon, between May 15 and June 21, the percentage of positive tests has gone from 1.6% to 5.1%. None of this is promising news.
"Missoula City-County Health Department details why it shut down Missoula Mavericks' baseball tournament"
"The reason the Missoula City-County Health Department canceled the Missoula Mavericks Memorial Tournament Friday had nothing to do with sanitizing, seating, excluding anyone with coronavirus symptoms, or the ability to trace people who attended but were later diagnosed with COVID-19.
While all those things were necessary for the tournament, the crux of the cancellation involved its round-robin format, said Shannon Therriault, the Environmental Health Director of the Missoula City-County Health Department.
A May 28 order from the Missoula City-County Health Officer limits groups that can't follow social distancing to 50 people. While fans can stay the necessary 6 feet apart, players batting, running the bases, playing in the field or just sitting in the dugout would necessarily be within 6 feet of each other at various times.
[My god, have these people never played baseball? The chance of spread outside in these situations is virtually zero.]
“They did have a plan, so they were trying to do a number of the things that will help keep people safe,” Therriault said. “They had ideas about how to do sanitizing between the games. They were spreading the games out so that you didn’t have a bunch of people on top of each other as the games were changing.
Events at or below 50 people aren’t subject to the May 28 order. Once there’s more than 50 people, all requirements in Appendix A of the order apply, including the group of 50 people that can't follow social distancing not intermingling with people outside that group during the event. A written plan is required when there’s more than 250 people, and that plan has to be approved by the Health Department when there’s more than 1,000 people, a figure which the Mavs apparently didn’t reach.
Limiting groups to the same 50 people was possible if one team, which has about 20 players and coaches, was facing only one other team, but each team at the tournament was scheduled to play five teams. It didn’t matter that two of the teams were from outside Montana; the requirement would've been the same if all the teams were from within the state.
The health department suggested having the same two teams play each other each day if the tournament wanted to continue. [Again, this is just plain stupid. Obviously, they never played the game.] It was open to other ideas that the Mavs could come up with other than the round-robin format or a bracket format, but the team never presented an acceptable plan that would comply, Therriault said.
Therriault said that’s [a state recommendation] a recommendation and it’s up to each county’s health department to enforce it as it sees fit. That’s why other counties — like Gallatin County, which has the most COVID-19 cases in the state — have held tournaments formatted like the one the Mavs ran.
[Missoula continues to be out of step with the rest of the state.]
Therriault said that number was put at 50 by the governor so that if someone at an event comes down with COVID-19, there's a manageable number of people to contact trace and quarantine.
“If you don’t put a firebreak around these large events in these groups of 50, then that becomes almost impossible and it’s just a way for the disease to take off in Missoula,” she said.
“One of the reasons why we really wanted to look at something to make sure that events were going to be at least as safe as possible is because we are a medical center for all of western Montana,” Therriault said. “We don’t want our hospitals overwhelmed. [Huh, the MIssoula hospitals have been empty.] It’s all about flattening the curve. We talked about that at the beginning of the pandemic. That’s still a thing. As our cases go up, we need to make sure that those cases don’t go up in a way where our medical facilities are overwhelmed.” [Missoula county has had about 4 cases in 2 months, and only 1 death the whole time.]
The health department was alerted to the tournament when it got a comment on its Facebook page around 8:30 a.m. Thursday, about 2 1/2 hours before games began. That prompted Environmental Health Specialist Alisha Johnson to reach out to the Mavs, who submitted the plan they had in place. Johnson and Mavs president Ginger Claussen also had a phone call Thursday.
The health department didn’t get a response from the Mavs about the format changing as Friday afternoon neared. The agency sent an email at 11:50 a.m. that said an order to comply would be sent if requirements weren't met, and Johnson emailed an order to cancel, written by Health Officer Ellen Leahy, at 4:18 p.m. as the sixth game was close to finishing; the Mavs claimed they didn't receive it until 4:57 p.m.
Before that was sent, the Mavs and the health department did have discussions about the steps being taken with social distancing in the stands, cleaning the park and how they were logging entrants’ names and cities, among other things. Even if those changes were made to comply, it wouldn’t have mattered until the format of the tournament was changed, Therriault said, so there wasn’t a reason to go out to the ballpark to check on any of those changes.
The Mavs could still end up playing several teams over the two-week incubation period for COVID-19 during non-tournament play, which raises a question: Why is it OK for them to play that many different teams in that time frame but not OK to have a tournament, which is viewed as one event instead of individual games, where they’re playing multiple teams just over a shorter period of time?
“It’s complicated because there are all different ways that people play sports, all different ways that people have events. It’s not making it perfectly safe, but it’s trying to take reasonable precautions to be able to help slow down or prevent the spread of COVID-19. It’s just not a normal year, and so we have to do things differently.”
Mavs manager Brent Hathaway said Friday that he felt like his team, which wasn’t allowed to host its Memorial Day Tournament in May, was being targeted. The Missoula Strikers tournament also got shut down Friday, so it’s not just the Mavs who have been impacted.
“There’s no reason for us to target the Mavericks,” she said. “First of all, that’s not something we would do. Second of all, I don’t even understand why. I think people would feel that way because they’re seeing it from their side. But really, we’re talking to all people about tournaments here. We’re telling all sorts of different organizations that they can’t have tournaments. It just is a lot better when we can talk with them before the tournament starts.”
The Mavs launched a GoFundMe page after the tournament was canceled to raise funds to pay its bills, including a newly built indoor training facility. They've raised $1,375 of their $10,000 goal as of 7:30 p.m. Monday.
Hathaway also raised the question multiple times asking why the Farmers’ Market has been allowed to go on but the Mavs’ tournaments haven’t. The Mavs’ tournament was classified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “highest risk,” which is defined as “Large, in-person gatherings where it is difficult for individuals to remain spaced at least 6 feet apart, and attendees travel from outside of the local areas.”
The Farmers’ Market is applying the concept of keeping people who don’t live together 6 feet apart, limiting the number of people who can enter at a time, spreading out its vendors, having one-way traffic and cutting out activities that would bring people into close contact, such as live music. [I call BS on this.] The Missoula PaddleHeads have also followed social distancing in order to host movie nights at their ballpark.
The question of why protests have been allowed to go on in town in recent weeks has also been raised. Those protests are less organized than a team sport, so there's not a specific organization to speak with. Therriault also noted that "people in America have an absolute right to free speech."
The health department did have a few options if the Mavs didn't follow the order to cancel. Those included asking for a temporary restraining order from a court, asking law enforcement to implement the order at the park or putting up a sign at the park that said the venue is closed.
Frank Gogola covers Griz football and prep sports for the Missoulian. Follow him on Twitter @FrankGogola or email him at [email protected].
https://missoulian.com/sports/baseball/legion/missoula-city-county-health-department-details-why-it-shut-down-missoula-mavericks-baseball-tournament/article_b716f886-f1c3-5c18-b881-a5d113669645.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-1
"The reason the Missoula City-County Health Department canceled the Missoula Mavericks Memorial Tournament Friday had nothing to do with sanitizing, seating, excluding anyone with coronavirus symptoms, or the ability to trace people who attended but were later diagnosed with COVID-19.
While all those things were necessary for the tournament, the crux of the cancellation involved its round-robin format, said Shannon Therriault, the Environmental Health Director of the Missoula City-County Health Department.
A May 28 order from the Missoula City-County Health Officer limits groups that can't follow social distancing to 50 people. While fans can stay the necessary 6 feet apart, players batting, running the bases, playing in the field or just sitting in the dugout would necessarily be within 6 feet of each other at various times.
[My god, have these people never played baseball? The chance of spread outside in these situations is virtually zero.]
“They did have a plan, so they were trying to do a number of the things that will help keep people safe,” Therriault said. “They had ideas about how to do sanitizing between the games. They were spreading the games out so that you didn’t have a bunch of people on top of each other as the games were changing.
Events at or below 50 people aren’t subject to the May 28 order. Once there’s more than 50 people, all requirements in Appendix A of the order apply, including the group of 50 people that can't follow social distancing not intermingling with people outside that group during the event. A written plan is required when there’s more than 250 people, and that plan has to be approved by the Health Department when there’s more than 1,000 people, a figure which the Mavs apparently didn’t reach.
Limiting groups to the same 50 people was possible if one team, which has about 20 players and coaches, was facing only one other team, but each team at the tournament was scheduled to play five teams. It didn’t matter that two of the teams were from outside Montana; the requirement would've been the same if all the teams were from within the state.
The health department suggested having the same two teams play each other each day if the tournament wanted to continue. [Again, this is just plain stupid. Obviously, they never played the game.] It was open to other ideas that the Mavs could come up with other than the round-robin format or a bracket format, but the team never presented an acceptable plan that would comply, Therriault said.
Therriault said that’s [a state recommendation] a recommendation and it’s up to each county’s health department to enforce it as it sees fit. That’s why other counties — like Gallatin County, which has the most COVID-19 cases in the state — have held tournaments formatted like the one the Mavs ran.
[Missoula continues to be out of step with the rest of the state.]
Therriault said that number was put at 50 by the governor so that if someone at an event comes down with COVID-19, there's a manageable number of people to contact trace and quarantine.
“If you don’t put a firebreak around these large events in these groups of 50, then that becomes almost impossible and it’s just a way for the disease to take off in Missoula,” she said.
“One of the reasons why we really wanted to look at something to make sure that events were going to be at least as safe as possible is because we are a medical center for all of western Montana,” Therriault said. “We don’t want our hospitals overwhelmed. [Huh, the MIssoula hospitals have been empty.] It’s all about flattening the curve. We talked about that at the beginning of the pandemic. That’s still a thing. As our cases go up, we need to make sure that those cases don’t go up in a way where our medical facilities are overwhelmed.” [Missoula county has had about 4 cases in 2 months, and only 1 death the whole time.]
The health department was alerted to the tournament when it got a comment on its Facebook page around 8:30 a.m. Thursday, about 2 1/2 hours before games began. That prompted Environmental Health Specialist Alisha Johnson to reach out to the Mavs, who submitted the plan they had in place. Johnson and Mavs president Ginger Claussen also had a phone call Thursday.
The health department didn’t get a response from the Mavs about the format changing as Friday afternoon neared. The agency sent an email at 11:50 a.m. that said an order to comply would be sent if requirements weren't met, and Johnson emailed an order to cancel, written by Health Officer Ellen Leahy, at 4:18 p.m. as the sixth game was close to finishing; the Mavs claimed they didn't receive it until 4:57 p.m.
Before that was sent, the Mavs and the health department did have discussions about the steps being taken with social distancing in the stands, cleaning the park and how they were logging entrants’ names and cities, among other things. Even if those changes were made to comply, it wouldn’t have mattered until the format of the tournament was changed, Therriault said, so there wasn’t a reason to go out to the ballpark to check on any of those changes.
The Mavs could still end up playing several teams over the two-week incubation period for COVID-19 during non-tournament play, which raises a question: Why is it OK for them to play that many different teams in that time frame but not OK to have a tournament, which is viewed as one event instead of individual games, where they’re playing multiple teams just over a shorter period of time?
“It’s complicated because there are all different ways that people play sports, all different ways that people have events. It’s not making it perfectly safe, but it’s trying to take reasonable precautions to be able to help slow down or prevent the spread of COVID-19. It’s just not a normal year, and so we have to do things differently.”
Mavs manager Brent Hathaway said Friday that he felt like his team, which wasn’t allowed to host its Memorial Day Tournament in May, was being targeted. The Missoula Strikers tournament also got shut down Friday, so it’s not just the Mavs who have been impacted.
“There’s no reason for us to target the Mavericks,” she said. “First of all, that’s not something we would do. Second of all, I don’t even understand why. I think people would feel that way because they’re seeing it from their side. But really, we’re talking to all people about tournaments here. We’re telling all sorts of different organizations that they can’t have tournaments. It just is a lot better when we can talk with them before the tournament starts.”
The Mavs launched a GoFundMe page after the tournament was canceled to raise funds to pay its bills, including a newly built indoor training facility. They've raised $1,375 of their $10,000 goal as of 7:30 p.m. Monday.
Hathaway also raised the question multiple times asking why the Farmers’ Market has been allowed to go on but the Mavs’ tournaments haven’t. The Mavs’ tournament was classified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “highest risk,” which is defined as “Large, in-person gatherings where it is difficult for individuals to remain spaced at least 6 feet apart, and attendees travel from outside of the local areas.”
The Farmers’ Market is applying the concept of keeping people who don’t live together 6 feet apart, limiting the number of people who can enter at a time, spreading out its vendors, having one-way traffic and cutting out activities that would bring people into close contact, such as live music. [I call BS on this.] The Missoula PaddleHeads have also followed social distancing in order to host movie nights at their ballpark.
The question of why protests have been allowed to go on in town in recent weeks has also been raised. Those protests are less organized than a team sport, so there's not a specific organization to speak with. Therriault also noted that "people in America have an absolute right to free speech."
The health department did have a few options if the Mavs didn't follow the order to cancel. Those included asking for a temporary restraining order from a court, asking law enforcement to implement the order at the park or putting up a sign at the park that said the venue is closed.
Frank Gogola covers Griz football and prep sports for the Missoulian. Follow him on Twitter @FrankGogola or email him at [email protected].
https://missoulian.com/sports/baseball/legion/missoula-city-county-health-department-details-why-it-shut-down-missoula-mavericks-baseball-tournament/article_b716f886-f1c3-5c18-b881-a5d113669645.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-1
grizindabox said:
The important aspects are ages of cases, how many in the hospital, and how many deaths. Young people, many with no symptoms, are testing positive. They know there is little risk to themselves, so they are going out and about. Bars and other social gatherings.
While it is unfortunate that cases involving younger, and mostly not at risk, people are growing, my view is that there are only limited options for dealing with this subset of people and we are going to have to figure out how to deal with it. Shutting down a round robin tourney of high school kids in a county with virtually no cases, is not the way to do it. My view is that many of those kids will believe they have been treated unfairly and will be less likely to listen to the health department's directives in the future.
PlayerRep said:
I believe Slidewaters at Lake Chelan was last week.
https://www.kxly.com/spokane-judge-denies-lake-chelan-water-parks-motion-to-reopen-despite-stay-home-order/
PlayerRep said:
So maybe we make a deal to play football at the Cats' field in Bozeman. Kind of like moving from a mansion to a single wide but at least we could play football. Lots of nice high school fields probably available too.
grizindabox said:
https://youtu.be/E6KPeZWcENE
I have a friend that lives there. They said Slidewaters opened this last Saturday.
Interesting article and short sound bite from the owner on the opening:
https://www.kpq.com/slidewaters-in-chelan-opens-for-season/
From Slidewaters website, information page:
Opening Day
Closing Day
Open Daily
June 20th*
Sept. 7th*
10am - 7pm
On June 18th, we received approval from CDHD to begin our season.
*Opening and closing dates may change due to the impacts of the global crisis.
Opening Day
Closing Day
Open Daily
June 20th*
Sept. 7th*
10am - 7pm
On June 18th, we received approval from CDHD to begin our season.
*Opening and closing dates may change due to the impacts of the global crisis.
IntuitiveGriz said:
Yeah, CDHD has come out to say that the approval is to reopen when the state requirements allow which isn't until Phase 3 for waterparks. Chelan is currently in Phase 1. So they are opened in conflict with the state, so it will be interesting to see what if anything happens.
On a side note, Montana's newest water park is delayed opening:
https://mtstandard.com/news/local/broken-pipe-delays-ridge-waters-opening-again/article_2f365314-7efb-5bf9-89dc-9595073e30fb.html
https://mtstandard.com/news/local/broken-pipe-delays-ridge-waters-opening-again/article_2f365314-7efb-5bf9-89dc-9595073e30fb.html
ilovethecats
Well-known member
IntuitiveGriz said:
Reading that article you know what pisses me off the most? That yet another waterpark has opened in the state, and Bozeman barely has a fricken pool for the kids. It's a joke to be honest.
But hey we have 25 dog parks and amazing walking trails. Kids love walking trails. :roll: