When new Covid-19 restrictions in Santa Clara County, Calif., evicted the San Francisco 49ers and sent them scrambling for a new home in the middle of the NFL season, they simply followed a trail blazed by other teams from California and across the country. They moved to Arizona.
The Phoenix area emerged as an unlikely oasis for sports in recent months because of its willingness to host youth events during the pandemic as nearby states restricted or barred them altogether. Phoenix has hosted tournaments featuring hundreds of teams, with thousands of athletes at a time—even as coronavirus cases surged and modelers said Arizona’s number of Covid-19 hospitalizations could exceed the number of hospital beds by around Christmas.
The resulting tension between these events and the Covid surge came to a head when Phoenix’s city council gathered Wednesday night for a virtual meeting. With tournaments promising to bring together tens of thousands of young athletes, coaches and parents in the coming months, the council voted 7-2 to cancel all organized sports at the city’s fields until virus levels in Maricopa County return to a moderate level.
The debate pitted some parents and youth sports advocates, who argued that organized sports were safe and healthy for kids during the pandemic, against others including the mayor and public health experts who warned that the events could further spread the virus.
Phoenix’s ruling doesn’t affect the state’s professional or college teams, such as Arizona State in nearby Tempe, only facilities managed by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. It also won’t upend the 49ers in Glendale, Ariz.
But one of the nation’s primary refuges for playing organized youth sports is closed for business.
Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist who consults with the city of Phoenix, called it a “very necessary decision,” adding that there had been reports of Covid-19 cases and clusters in teams at some of the tournaments. After speaking at the city council meeting advocating a halt to tournaments, she started receiving threatening messages, Popescu tweeted.
“The concern was that if we didn’t, it could contribute to the growing case counts and strain on public health and health care,” Popescu, who’s an assistant professor at George Mason University, later wrote in an email. “It’s never ideal to impact activities like this for children, but really this reflects the seriousness of the situation.”
The city council’s decision came after the influx of youth teams to Arizona created an unintended consequence: Sports clampdowns in neighboring states prompted teams who otherwise play close to home to instead travel and engage in riskier activities like staying in hotels and visiting restaurants.
Thanksgiving weekend laid bare this troublesome phenomenon when more than 500 soccer teams gathered for the Desert Super Cup. The youth tournament drew thousands of people, a significant portion from out of state, and triggered alarm bells from onlookers who watched the event go on while the infections in the state worsened.
That was just the beginning: A report filed to the Phoenix city council said that from December through February, there were 30 soccer and softball tournaments scheduled with about 4,000 teams, nearly 1,900 of which would come from out of state.
“It’s bringing people together who wouldn’t ordinarily be together. And those conditions are ripe to transmit the virus,” said Joe Gerald, an associate professor of public-health policy and management at the University of Arizona who has modeled the virus trends in the state. “Some of those cases are going to remain in the community with us, and others are going to be spread to the four corners of the U.S. when they go home.”
When city officials reopened athletic fields Sept. 2 after a five-month closure, they unwittingly opened floodgates for visitors desperate for a place to resume games.
New Mexico is one of four states, along with Illinois, Washington and California, that’s been unable to stage league youth soccer play during the pandemic, according to U.S. Youth Soccer. With New Mexico banning gatherings larger than five people, teams wanting to play games had to leave the state.
“If we were able to do more here, I think 80% of the teams that are traveling would not at all,” said Chris Hurst, director of coaching for the Albuquerque, N.M.-based Rio Rapids Soccer Club. About 175 players from the club traveled to the Phoenix area a few weeks ago to play in two separate tournaments, but a return trip to Arizona now looks doubtful. Most big cities in Texas are too long a drive, and the Rapids scrapped a planned trip to El Paso weeks ago, as news spread that refrigerated trucks for morgue overflow had arrived.
A Phoenix area-based company called USA Softball of Arizona/9 Star Sports, which operates fast-pitch softball tournaments, saw participation in two events it hosted in October involving more than 140 teams surge about 35%—and even more among teams coming from out of state, said Bobby Pena, the company’s president and director.
Entire events that were uprooted elsewhere replanted themselves in Arizona. The Surf Cup has for decades been one of the biggest and most prestigious youth soccer events, where hundreds of teams, vendors and college coaches gather. And if the name were any clue, the Surf Cup doesn’t usually take place in the desert. It’s usually just a few miles from the beach near San Diego.
Pandemic restrictions forced the Surf Cup to find a new host, and when it thought it found a home in Phoenix it received a record number of applications. “There’s just pent-up demand,” said Brian Enge, the CEO of Surf Cup Sports.
Enge said Surf Cup Sports studied the issue and found that kids weren’t transmitting the virus on the field. The point echoed findings in the NFL and college sports, which suggest that the virus hasn’t been transmitted on the field as much as in team gatherings off of it. Enge added that they had designed safety protocols, such as limitations on the number of parents, who would be required to wear masks.
Jaylan Romero, a high-school senior in Albuquerque, has taken several weeklong trips to Phoenix with her dad to play for a soccer club there, and was planning to play in the Surf Cup. The aspiring college player hoped online broadcasts of games there would draw attention from college coaches, but the shutdown has imperiled her plan.
“It’s been really heartbreaking,” Romero said.
The paramount worry of health officials isn’t what happens on the field. It’s people shirking safety measures off of it—either during tournaments or when they’re in town. “That’s the problem,” Ross Goldberg, president of the Arizona Medical Association, said. “These things don’t occur in isolation.”
In the wake of the Phoenix city council vote, the Surf Cup is now scrambling for yet another host site. The organizers have some leads—including other cities in Arizona.
