Winter sports struggled last week with a viral sickness ‘plague’. Over 200 students were out at a time with various cold-like symptoms that spread throughout the school. The lack of eligibility of players paralleled the lack of students who weren’t in class.

“Unless you’re at a doctor’s appointment and you have a note, you have to be here all day to play in a game, and you have to be here for the second half of the day to play or to participate in practice,” athletic office secretary Angie Root said

Root does a lot of managing and checking athletes’ eligibility, keeping track of who was absent and who can’t play or practice. She works in the athletic office to make sure that everything is organized and in check.

“We run eligibility every two weeks on Friday, and then I give them to Mr. Cunningham,” Root said. “If the students are ineligible, he calls them up here to talk to them, and if they’ve been gone because they’ve been sick, sometimes there are exceptions if they haven’t turned stuff in. He will talk to the teachers and to the students to see what the deal is, and sometimes there will be exceptions made so that they can still play.”

There have been a lot of updates that need to be taken care of when it comes to checking grades and making sure students who have been out sick are keeping up on assignments so that their grades are good enough for play when they return.

“We had a lot of kids that couldn’t play in games this past week due to sickness and I think most kids felt so bad they didn’t want to show up for the game whether they were eligible or not,” Root said.

One of those players includes Senior girls basketball player Maddie Mckale, who was out most of last week due to being sick. McKale was a victim of the virus that went around and had to stay home from school the entire week last week.

“I got influenza A last week and was sick for five days,” McKale said. “I had a fever and a cough leading to me being stuck in bed. I ended up missing one game and three practices.”

Following the sickness, McKale was put in game situations without much practice prior. As a result, performance in the games was impacted.

“When I came back, I had a talk with Coach B about how I felt and just took it easy in practice and eased back into it,” McKale said. “At that point, I was still coughing quite a bit so it was pretty hard to get back into the swing of things, not practicing for a week can make you a bit rusty, but after a week I have been able to recover.”