The Star Tribune is Using Sunday’s Paper to Scare the MSHSL Out of Reinstating Fall Sports on Monday

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Photo: Jim Mone - AP

Woke media outlets across the country (like the Minneapolis Star Tribune) tried their best all summer to cancel pro sports, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. League by league and sport by sport, their efforts failed. Quickly, they turned their cancellation causes toward amateur athletics, especially fall football and volleyball. Blue states, including Minnesota, axed many of their high school fall sports in early August. At the college level, the woke Big Ten and PAC-12 were right alongside them.

The Big Ten came to their senses and reinstated fall football a month later. At the high school level, we’ve already seen Michigan, Delaware and Pennsylvania cancel and then reinstate fall sports, too. In total, according to MaxPreps.com, 34 states plan on playing fall football and 17 (plus the District of Columbia) have pushed it back to winter or spring. Volleyball isn’t included with the MaxPrep numbers but is hitched to football, at least in Minnesota.

Let’s Scare Some People!

Since playing football during COVID times doesn’t fit narratives within major media outlets, facts are often ignored and replaced with “scary” words and warnings.

From reading this headline, COVID might as well be a monster that “lurks” in your closet. Throw in the “thousands” of athletes, in caption form, and you have yourself one scary headline. That’s what they want. They want you to be scared. Don’t be.

Luckily, the Star Tribune is responsible enough to lace their hyperbole with real numbers. They don’t want you to actually look at those numbers and feel good about playing fall football/volleyball, though. Instead, they fudge the numbers and surround them with really scary verbiage from different “medical experts”, throughout the article.

Only One Type of “Expert” Matters in 2020

Reminder, before you read this excerpt: There are very serious consequences (beyond COVID) to taking away youth sports. Those consequences range from deteriorating mental and physical health, to family dynamics to social interaction. How you were “feeling” mentally was deemed extremely important before the pandemic. Now, feelings don’t matter. We ONLY care about the opinions of epidemiologists and disease experts, whose jobs are to worry about viruses, disease and pandemics year-round.

You will find ZERO quotes from psychologists or family doctors whose answers might not fit this “everyone run and hide from COVID” narrative.

It’s Halloween Season at the Star Tribune

During the health department’s presentation, Griffith said, “We cannot say anything is safe. We aren’t able to exonerate any sport during a pandemic.’’

Later Ehresmann said she sees “no difference now in risk from earlier in the summer when the MSHSL decided to wait on these sports.’’ What’s new is data from the start of school sports shows “evidence of transmission,’’ she said. “We continue to see a high level of community transmission.’’

Malcolm noted that “outdoor venues and outdoor sports appear to be less risky than indoor sports’’ but added that sports with high levels of contact, such as football, “just do have a risk.’’

Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the department’s medical director, acknowledged the “complex issue’’ of balancing the amount of virus in the community with people’s activities.

“This is not a cold,’’ she said. “There are some people who do fine with this, but there are others, including young people, who don’t do fine. Along with the sports there are coaches, there are other people who may have underlying conditions, and would have a severe illness if they were to be infected.

“We’re only beginning to learn about potential complications that occur in young people,’’ she said, noting a recent report from Ohio connecting the virus to college athletes and concerns about a heart condition known as myocarditis.

“We really don’t have a sense of all the things this virus can do,’’ Lynfield said. “We just have to be aware.’’

Star Tribune

Just Fudge the Numbers!

The agenda of the Star Tribune and other major media outlets around the country (especially in blue states) comes out crystal clear in articles like this one.

Specifically here, the Star Tribune includes adult/college-league COVID numbers, even while the article is supposed to be about youth spread. Almost all active participants in high school sports are under the age of 18… so why are we including those numbers? Because, if the Strib were to take these non-youth numbers out, they’d find it a lot harder to show that COVID kills everyone.

Instead of dropping the issue when they run into non-narrative fitting facts, woke news outlets just add a few irrelevant numbers here and some extra groups there… and BOO! Are you scared yet? Don’t be.

The length the Star Tribune went to, in order to scare youth parents and MSHSL board members before they re-vote on fall sports come Monday, is disgusting. The timing is so obvious, even, that they had to admit it.

Front Page Living?

This story will sit on the front page of tomorrow’s paper, that’s a guarantee. It’s a last-ditch effort to halt the momentum that fall football has gained over the last couple weeks. Don’t fall into the trap.

I seriously implore the MSHSL to look at this situation with open eyes. All five states around us are playing football in the fall and our COVID numbers in Minnesota have consistently been lower than over half the states in the US.

Kids and adults will play sports and resume their regularly scheduled lives with or without the Minnesota school system. That’s already evident. Sports like baseball, softball and basketball are still being played statewide at all ages. Shutting down fall football and volleyball will do nothing but cause a bigger political division across the state. That’s what the media wants.

The list of states that are playing vs those who aren’t is divided completely along political party lines. It’s sad that we’re allowing politics to get between our kids, physical activity and social interaction.

Eric Strack | Minnesota Sports Fan

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