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School leaders of the Virginia Colonial Conference, which includes Kenston Forest School (KFS), agreed at a Wednesday, Sept. 9, meeting to preserve all three 2020-21 conference sports seasons by playing them largely in early 2021.

“What we’ve done for the conference is we have done that condensed schedule similar to what some of the other private school conferences and what (Virginia High School League) is doing,” KFS Athletics Director Joe Maione said.

“So we’re going to play all seasons, starting with basketball,” he continued. “We’ll play it in December and January. Football, volleyball and fall sports will be played in February, March and then spring sports in April and May.”

These significant scheduling changes have come about as schools continue to guard against the spread of the novel coronavirus.

There will be a small group of schools, including Kenston Forest, that will play friendly baseball, softball and golf matches this fall, starting possibly as soon as the week after next, Maione stated Monday, Sept. 14.

“So we’ll actually have two little seasons for some of those sports, but those are a lot of those kids that lost a lot last spring,” he said.

The baseball, softball and golf teams will play their second season, which will include their official conference competitions, in early 2021.

Maione sees some key advantages to having the friendly matches this fall.

“It’s going to give us a chance to work through some of the things that I think we’d be kind of naive to think we’re going to roll into the end of November, beginning of December and be ready to start indoor basketball and not work through transportation and how we’re going to handle fans and lot of those different things,” he said.

“And I think that this brief (season), with a handful of schools, is going to give us an opportunity to work through a lot of that logistics and protocols that are going to be totally different the rest of this year.”

He said details, like how many fans will be able to attend the friendly matches, are still being worked out.

“We’ll have those in the next few weeks before we get started,” he said.