For South Carolina high school basketball and wrestling teams, this has been a “winter of discontent”.

The number of postponed or cancelled contests the past 2 months due to the ongoing pandemic has unofficially exceeded even the 40 percent rate reported in December by the SC High School League.

Both Brooland-Cayce teams rescheduled games this week, while Irmo junior varsity and varsity cancelled games versus Dreher.

“Frustrating”

This past Saturday saw both the 8th ranked Lexington and Dutch Fork girls’ basketball teams return to action following a 31-day layoff. Lexington was among the School District 1 teams which postponed athletic events prior to the Christmas break, while the Lady Silver Foxes last played Dec. 8.

Following the 58-47 victory, Lady Wildcats’ head coach Molly Goodrich acknowledged the team has experienced a “whirlwind” to get back in game shape within a short period.

“I would say that losing players here and there and then, it seems like every week is a new team,” she said. “And so, you can tell that even for Dutch Fork, I’m sure that just trying to get the consistency and trying to get the team out there and making smart decisions and connecting.

“I thought we had really good fastbreak opportunities, but it’s just connecting and gaining that confidence. We just need through a lot of practice through basketball, so it can only get better from here.”

Goodrich said the uncertainty from day to day is “frustrating”, but she keeps encouraging her team to remain upbeat and “step up” and play their game.

“Glad to play”

It was only a 15-day layoff for the 6th ranked Dutch Fork boys’ basketball team.

The Silver Foxes have won their 1st 2 Region 5-5A games of the new year with victories over Chapin and Lexington to remain undefeated entering Tuesday’s rematch with the Wildcats.

The hiatus took away several non-region games and tournaments Dutch Fork boys’ basketball head coach Brett Jones uses to develop team chemistry. It’s especially vital for a team which had key players like Jarvis Green now available after another long successful football championship run.

“We’re just glad to play and I’m glad the kids got to play,” said Jones after the 57-50 win over Chapin. “The negative is you didn’t get to play a preseason to figure out what’s going wrong, what you need to work on. So we hated that we had to play really our 3rd game as a region game with everybody back. But, we did it. We won and now we’ve got tape and we can watch more film and show them what they did wrong and what they did well.”

“Chase that bigger end goal”

As a 1st year head wrestling coach, River Bluff’s Joe Cummings has faced a unique challenge. with 4 wrestling dates being cancelled this season for the Gators.

This past Saturday’s tri-match with Hammond School and Dreher was just the team’s 4th and 5th matches of the season.

River Bluff swept the tri-match, defeating Hammond 57-13 for the 2nd time this season over the Skyhawks, followed by a 65-14 victory over Dreher to improve to 5-0.

“You’ve got challenges in a normal year of keeping guys healthy,” Cummings said. “Now you add (covid-19) to it, it’s a different layer. But it’s just the hand that we’ve been dealt and we’ve kind of been preaching to the kids you do the best that you can with the hand that you’ve been dealt.

“The kids have done a really good job of staying positive and staying the course. There’s obviously a lot of hurdles, but we just do what we can and try to stay afloat and keep going.”

Despite the difficulties, the Gators remain very much focused on a 5th consecutive region title and 2nd state title in school history.

“Our motto is kind of go 1-0 every day,” Cummings said. “And if we can go 1-0 every day, then we’ll get into the right place to be ready after that. To get there, we’ve got a very tough region. We’ve got to focus on region before we can focus on anything after that.

“So obviously, you always have in the back of your mind that you want to chase that bigger end goal. But for now, we’re fully focused on region and tackling the task at hand which is battling some tough teams in our region and going 1 and 0 every day, trying to take every day going to the top.”