Are there ever any happy endings with COVID?
It’s hard to imagine a person, industry or institution in America that hasn’t been negatively affected by COVID.
We’re closing in on one million deaths in the United States; close to 60 million have been infected by the virus.
It seems trivial to talk about the way the pandemic has disrupted sports at every level, but that’s a big part of our lives. Every team, player and coach has been put through the grinder for the past 22 months. Few took as big a hit as Reading High’s football team.
The Red Knights lost their 2020 season. They lost some of their best players. Now they’ve lost their coach. All COVID casualties.
Andre Doyle, the head coach since 2019, just couldn’t take it any longer. The job was demanding enough pre-COVID. With all that went on once the pandemic hit it was just too much.
He began talking to school administrators in November about an exit; that finally became public last week when the school announced the job was open.
Twenty-four months earlier the mood was much brighter. Doyle was optimistic. He felt momentum in the program. The Red Knights won six games during the 2019 season and qualified for the Eastern Conference playoffs.
“We were really confident in our outlook for 2020,” he said. “We thought we had built and instilled a lot of leadership in our upperclassmen.”
All of that ended in March when the world came to a screeching halt. That included high school sports. The PIAA basketball tournament was stopped mid-tournament. Spring sports were scratched entirely. Summer practices were put on hold. They started again in July but when an athlete at Reading High reported close contact with an infected person all the programs at the school were shut down. In August the school board canceled the entire fall season.
Program shutdowns created turmoil across the country but at Reading High they had lasting effects. One top football player left to play in another state. Another left to play at a rival school. At least one player dropped out of school. All told, Doyle said seven players left the program. That’s a big hit for any program, devastating to one of the edge.
“They slipped away from the program, and didn’t resurface,” Doyle said of the players who left because there was no season to play. “When we shut down, we knew at that point that it was going to be a complete rebuild (for 2021). Because of the distance that would be created (with players unable to practice or meet with coaches in person) it would be tough (to maintain momentum).”
Reading High played a modified football season in the spring — five games, all losses, with a minimal roster. The program, already behind its Berks 1 rivals, fell even further behind. Every other Berks football team had some kind of 2020 season and a semi-normal offseason to get ready for 2021. Reading didn’t.
“We were really be on the verge of creating something good,” Doyle said, “and then, being completely shut down, with players going in different directions . . . “
The 2020 shutdown led to a difficult 2021 season, during which Reading won just one game and saw two games canceled during to COVID issues.
“It just didn’t work out,” said Doyle.
The 39-year-old Doyle said he won’t be coaching anywhere in 2022. He’s taken a job in the private sector and will focus on completing his doctoral degree.
“There’s no regrets,” he said. “I heavily enjoyed my time in Reading. I’m encouraged about what we were able to accomplish, not just on the field but off, with the community service hours, the overall GPA of the team continuing to increase; we were proud of that.
“I know that those young men are going to go out and do something great, and at the end of the day that’s what it’s really about.”
