001hello everyone thank you for coming tonight um welcome to winter sports night my name is victoria stewart i'm the athletic director here at amherst regional high school um tonight was just an opportunity for you guys to meet the coaches um see the head coaches of the varsity programs and also ask a few questions before the audience asks any questions i would like the staff and coaches to introduce themselves starting with ross and then we will go through the sports in alphabetical order ross good evening everyone my name is ross beck i'm the athletic trainer here at amherst this is my fifth year at amherst for eighth year as a trainer i have an extended video that i think victoria shared with everybody that explains concussions and injuries a little more and if you're interested watch
002that and any other medical questions feel free to reach out thanks ross and we're going to start with alpine uh good evening everybody my name is coach kulas i will be working with the alpine team this year this is my first year at amherst but one of many working in the alpine field so i look forward to meeting each and every one of you and having a great season this year boys basketball hi everyone my name is basil uh this is my first year coach here in amherst um played here not too long ago but uh looking forward to getting back into it i've coached five plus years before and before now and uh looking to get back into it with the boys uh with tryouts coming up next monday girls basketball hi my name
003is ralph luce um the girls varsity coach is my second year um and i just can't wait to get back in the gym to be perfectly honest with you so looking forward to getting started ice hockey good evening everybody my name is mike russo i'm the head coach of the hockey team um this will be my sixth or seventh year i'm not quite sure um but looking forward like all the other coaches get back into our respective facilities and to drop the puck and let's get at it thank you okay we have nordic yeah hey everyone my name is carl signoni i'm the head coach of the nordic ski team i've been coaching at uh different levels for cross-country skiing or nordic skiing for many many many years and i'm really i'm looking forward to
004getting out in the snow soon already thank you last but not least we have the swim coaches hi everyone i'm giselle hennessey i uh was swimming with amherst also not too long ago but i've been assisting coach the past two years this is my first year as a co-co-head coach at psalm in here but yeah we're also looking forward to this season thanks for attending all right um hi i'm solomon i've been an assistant coach for three years and this is going to be my first year as a co-head coach with giselle thank you guys all right and before we open up the floor for any questions i just wanted to give you guys a few updates and some information that you guys may or may not have at this point start date that's a
005big question that i get a lot the start date is a week from today exciting a little bit later than normal but it's happening uh january 11th we will have tryouts or first day of practice whatever the coaches call it um that's happening on monday a little bit more information can be found on our website so i just want to share the screen with you um so you know where to access all this information so i think right here you can see my screen so you just go to arps.org and you'd click on our high school our schools oops i just clicked on the family button look at that all right so you click on our schools you go to the high school once you go to the high school you go to athletics you
006go to athletics and then you see all this information this frequently asked questions page it has a lot of questions that you may be looking for it has our fabulous videos that all of our coaches put together thank you for our coaches for putting all that stuff together and coming here tonight the coaches have been working extremely hard trying to make sure that they can create a safe and um a safe and fun environment for our student athletes so i really appreciate all their support on their end um all their stuff they've done before the season started you can register right here it's highlighted and then the link for tonight's meeting but pretty much everything here my email address whenever you guys have any questions coaches email addresses can be found in the coaches directory
007right here as well and that is all i have to share from the website tonight um other big information pieces is that everyone needs to have their physical on file in order to play um and to participate in any tryouts and games that we may have if you do not have a physical on file with our nurse it needs to be sent to our nurse robert supernote it needs to be sent to her and then you guys will be eligible to play everyone needs to be registered and they need to have physical on file i would also suggest bringing more than one mask everyone is supposed to be wearing a mask this season no gators are allowed at any point in time i i would say from the fall people definitely needed to switch their
008masks more often than not being indoors i assume you know you may get a little bit more sweatier make sure you change your mask other than that i'm gonna leave you guys some more room to ask any questions we are delayed so sorry if you guys have any questions just post them in the comment section and ask away and i will make sure to answer them or bring up the coach to answer any ques sport specific questions you may have all right i don't see any questions at this point and no one has left this meeting from what i can see really so um other information that you guys may want to know there's no sharing any jerseys as well um and there's no sharing any water bottles water fountains are also only used to
009fill up water bottles at any point in time they're not used to drink out of them so make sure you bring a bottle oh recommendations for fall athletes i do have a few um i think someone has worn one if any coaches have any ones in mind uh please feel free to step in and just comment that you have one i would say the adidas one's pretty good um it's it fits well to the face and it's kind of loose it's like a dry fit so it actually dries out not loose but it dries a little bit better so the whole material so i would use the either the adidas one or the reebok one i like a lot of people use the medical mask but i see those fall a little bit easier than
010others okay how many games are there for hockey um at this point i i believe that we are still waiting for the official schedule to come out but i think we're shooting somewhere between 8 and 12 and 12 is going to be a high number so i'd probably say something like 10. probably like 10 games um where they're going to be i believe again this is all still being worked out i believe there's going to be a bubble at the olympia in west springfield um and as the scheduler of the pviac hockey uh teams go we're just gonna learn as as the days go by so i hope that's helpful thank you coach and we're gonna move on to the next question where do students meet for boys basketball tryouts um are we gonna have
011people meet in the front before i mean yeah i want to coordinate that want to coordinate that with the boys because there's going to probably be two separate tryouts uh depending on the registration amount if there's over 25 they're gonna need to have you know split it up between freshman sophomore junior and senior um and we'll send communication out before next monday so everyone knows when when and where uh you need to be for next week's tryout thank you and we are going to move um to this one do you know anything about buses for alpine skiing i'll take this one coach sam if you don't mind this is a question that i want to answer for a few teams so buses in general parents guardians and even students who can drive can drive themselves
012and transport themselves to games um as well as your parents can transport you or you can go um with someone else as well i just need to know ahead of time there are 23 people allowed on the bus at a time so that will um determine how many buses we will need for an event otherwise buses the bus schedule the coaches will let you know when the buses will leave for games it will also be posted on the mia website all right i am going to bring up my swim coaches so how will the virtual swimmies work uh as we know right now we are going to um have our swimmers compete we're going to put them in the pool have them do their events as normal except that the other team won't be there
013um we're looking into live streaming or somehow recording um the meat at our pool and then the idea is we share our results with the other team within each of us will compete within 24 hours of each other and then those results will get compared and scoring will be done so i think that's what we're looking at right now um to add to that the biggest difference you're going to notice is going to be that the meats are going to be kind of asynchronous they're going to progress pretty much the same way as they used to you know we're going to swim through the meats the excuse me the events and the meat boy girl boy girl all the way through in the normal order there just won't be the other team with us we're
014going to record our results and they're going to be verified by the official present and then we'll have to communicate with the the other coach the our meet up excuse me we're going to communicate with the opposing coaches electronically somehow so we're thinking about communicating in real time via google sheets or something but there's also going to be this there may be the situation in which the other team does not have the meet the same day that we have them and in that case we will still proceed with having our schedule meet but we'll hold on to our results and maybe use those at a later date coaches i'm going to keep you on but i will provide everyone with an update about the pool um as far as the pool goes we are still
015waiting on more information tomorrow we are bringing an outside contractor in to look um at how to resolve the issues that we have with the two filters that are broken they do need to be replaced and as of right now the coaches can give you a little bit of an update on what they're thinking about um for practices yeah so right now we have a couple of options as to what spaces we can use for working out together um there is a pool that we're looking into renting to get kids in the water um but we're looking into how feasible that will be as the the pools in voucher town so we just uh we we're gonna we're sending out an email soon we will get feedback from parents and see what people want to
016do otherwise we're definitely gonna do some dry lands in open spaces like the cafeteria and might even do some weightlifting in the weight room to just to get kids very lightweight lifting as well just to get kids kind of stronger um getting used to working out before they we get them back in the water so we'll definitely still be meeting times are still up in the air but we we will know by the end of the week and we'll be communicating that as soon as possible thank you coaches all right what's the next one we got here how many team basketball teams will there be is that the next one yep there you go uh there's going to be two teams who are both boys and girls right ralph looks to be what's gonna happen
017yes so varsity and a jv for both correct we're limited by numbers we get out in the gym so like like basil said with the tryouts that's going to kind of be up in the air how those things are handled you know i haven't even said how we're doing it yet until registrations are done um but yeah i think we're looking at a jv and varsity for both teams i know a lot of times basketball girls and boys say we combine jv and varsity practices and this year it's not looking like we're going to be able to do that or carry over any jv or have any swing players between jv and varsity it's not recommended so probably thank you coaches next one's for nordic so carl i'm going to bring you up on the
018screen oh how will nordic friday waxing work um i think this year with the um protocols for the pandemic we're going to be um asking the skiers to either just wax themselves or um we're going to be practicing in pods we're going to divide up the team into small groups if there is a way to wax together within your group we'll try to figure that out but it may result in people um the skiers particularly learning how to um to wax their skis um on their own at home um i'm kind of new to this so i'm not sure if we have a space at the school that would be big enough to do social distancing and waxing at the same time but um we'll probably do it outdoors like we were talking about before
019that's right yeah i mean i've done that for years and years myself just you know at a race set up my work wax bench bench at the back of my car and we can certainly do that as well and to make sure everyone gets waxed properly thanks that's a good question so the next question we have um okay so i will answer this question yes we are planning to have live stream um for every uh athletic event for home athletic event a lot of away teams they do not um where no one's allowing spectators for awake fans we're not allowing spectators at all but we will be streaming events live thank you for that question are we going to be skiing on the mountain i think this one's for alpine hello so we will have
020the opportunity to be skiing on the mountain we are looking fingers crossed that hopefully having one practice day on the mountain a week um coupled with one competition day so we're looking at tuesday and thursdays right now we're working on solidifying the schedule and as soon as i get that all set it will be communicated out to you all thank you um i will answer this question the answer the quick one is no there will be no playoffs this year um that's just how it is this year normally every other year i'm pretty sure you are new here but we do normally have playoffs all right so this i can answer this right now i mean it's not recommended um however they student athletes definitely can go there ross i don't know if you want
021to add to it i think it's free up until the 21st of which i believe is when the um students come back i believe so also it it wasn't anything we suggested they recommended in the fall for athletes um you know i'm not gonna discourage it if somebody wants to go do it but it's not anything we're gonna require or suggest thank you ross um this one's from our basketball player so ralph i'm going to add you here i will uh defer to you because i actually don't know it's a good question is that okay i assume it is i know skiing's in there till five that was something we were going to talk about i think actually yep so whenever the other teams that use this actually as their practice facility you guys will
022be able to use it um your coach will just need to supervise you somewhere last year thanks delaney for that question and for watching yes sir so yes we will need parents for timing oh no not not for timing just for scoring the summer's will time the swimmers will be timing for us got it so yeah we'll need parents for some things but not as many as as in normal normal years um and this is similar to all sports all sports are going to need some parent volunteers more often than not so just please be sure to um you know look at your emails and i realized i was muted when i was talking so just got a couple texts about that are there any more questions that anyone has at this time yes we
023do need volunteer scorekeepers we're going to need volunteers we're going to use them and they're all going to have to wear masks and follow the guidelines as well how will players communicate with coaches uh yeah i'm not sure if this is a girl or boys basketball question but either way um email texts phone call i'll be giving my cell phone number out to whomever makes the team uh so yeah we'll have open lines of communication on that front and with the girls program we use a program called remind which is a safe text messaging service it's uh it's all recorded and we'll use that to i use it to announce practices practice game times um all that stuff so we use that on a daily basis uh to remind people where and where they need
024to be and coaches other coaches would you like to say how you'll communicate with players too um as far as hockey's concerned um we're in pretty close proximity with the players as as we all are as coaches but uh with hockey there's one kind of a i guess it's a team kind of rule there will be no discussion of player issues at the rink um like uh coach basil said i'll give you my my email number my cell phone number um any type of player coach parent issue will be discussed away from uh the playing surface thank you um as far as swimming goes we've currently got a google group going through which our emails coaches emails will certainly come through and um i believe our our emails are attached to that too uh we'll
025also be sending out a document with our expectations and uh and such that we'll have our emails on there as well um so that's our main form of communication would be email and we'll make those readily available alpine is also using remind a lot of parents in here already that i see have already joined it i will be sending an email out to everybody that is registered after this though with the information in case they haven't registered yet okay thank you um busting two away games i think i went over this a little bit in the beginning but in case you missed it away games parents are allowed to transport their children um children are a lot of transport themselves if they can drive um they can carpool i just need to know beforehand just
026so i know how many buses we need to get um as far as the coaches presentations they have been emailed out to you but they are on the athletic webpage so if you go to the frequently asked questions page and where it says um what sports are we offering this winter you will see the videos a link to the videos where you can see all the videos um another question great question so in order to suspend practices in sports i am in touch um daily with our board of health um also with our superintendent uh dr morris and we have discussions um whether we need to cancel sports we even had the dis this discussion uh in the fall right we went red um mainly because of umass's numbers rising so umass comes back and
027if we go red we were still allowed to practice so it's definitely depends on the circumstances as well the mia really hasn't set any decisions or gives us any guidance we really go with our board of health um i think that's pretty much it for questions if there's no more questions at this point um i'll wait a couple more seconds like i said it lags so um i thought there was no questions in the beginning but then they all came at once so i'll leave a couple more minutes for questions otherwise i guess i can just talk i don't know if you intentionally skipped it but it looks like there's a question in there and twice sorry which one was it could coach presentations be emailed and registered families so that we can open the
028links oh yeah i thought i answered that but um so you can just go to the um suzanne you can go to the athletic webpage and go to the frequently asked questions and see under the questions what sports do we offer you'll see it right there the links to all those meetings oh someone had trouble opening the nordic one okay i will go back and look at the what it's saved under not a question but a nice comment so thank you mary nice comment from a nice lady another nice comment all right oh another one all right so i guess all these nice comments means we're coming to an end i really appreciate it my emails on the athletic webpage like i said feel free to send me an email i am more than happy
029to help answer the question or find someone that can answer the question for you happy new year and i can't wait to see everyone on january 11th if you have any questions feel free please do not hesitate to ask a good night bye thank you coaches i'm not sure vic victoria i'm not sure my phone's going to pick up that uh remind me thing let me ever see anything like that oh no but we are still alive but you know what it's all right humor it's all right he likes some humor oh yeah yeah oh yes you watch this oh yeah that's why pharaoh is the assistant he's gonna get all that stuff oh my gosh most of my players and parents know that