MOUNTAIN PINE -- Mountain Pine will not be taking the field this Friday night after a senior high football player tested positive for COVID-19.
According to multiple posts on the school district's Facebook page, the senior high football team is being quarantined for 14 days.
The first post regarding the positive test came just three hours after athletic director James Galarza posted information regarding the Red Devils' game this week at Marshall.
Red Devils head coach Sam Counce said that with a 14-day quarantine for the entire team, both Friday's junior high and high school games at Marshall and the teams' Oct. 2 games at Decatur will not be played.
"We'll miss two Fridays," he said. "What we'll have to do is -- Marshall's a (3A) school, so we won't necessarily have to make that one up, but Decatur's a (2A) school, in order to play for the conference championship and get into the playoffs, we'll have to play that game for sure. What we'll do is we'll try to schedule a Monday or Tuesday with them. And then also play that Friday, and we'll really get the games in to be able to qualify for a playoff berth."
This is the first game that the Red Devils have had to cancel this season. Someone connected to the athletic department tested positive this summer, forcing the cancellation of practice for two weeks, but this is the first student-athlete to test positive for COVID-19 at the school.
Counce said that the team was about 15 minutes from taking the field for practice Tuesday afternoon when he got the call that said one of his players tested positive.
"We were going out today and try to figure out how to practice with the rain what we'll try to get in because there's things we want to look at and do in order to look at Marshall's formations and stuff," he said. "I get a phone call about 15 minutes before we're fixing to go out on the field or go into the old gym and practice inside about a young man testing positive. Then, for 30 minutes, we have to sit in the dressing room and wait on our person of contact for COVID to come up and tell us what we can do. So, it's a lot of highs and lows right now."
With the small size of the school district, Counce said that he is also concerned about football players who might want to go out for basketball early. There are a number of athletes who play on both the football and basketball teams.
"The only thing that really, really concerns me is I've got kids that play basketball and football," he said. "The kids that are basketball players that are playing football they'll want to go to basketball early, probably. That kind of stuff concerns me as far as for their season starting basketball."