The Oahu Interscholastic Association announced via press release on Tuesday the cancellation of all league play for fall and winter season sports.

Affected sports are air riflery, boys and girls basketball, bowling, cheerleading, cross country, football, canoe paddling, boys and girls soccer, softball tennis, girls volleyball, swimming and diving and wrestling. All JV sports during the fall and winter seasons are also cancelled.

OIA Executive Director Raymond Fujino spoke with ScoringLive via video conference Wednesday afternoon about the difficult decision that the league reached.

"This decision didn't come very easy for the principals and the athletic directors of the OIA. We've been trying and holding on and waiting to at least start workouts and get something going as far as the league, but with every passing week the season's become less of a possibility, so I think the move forward right now is to focus on the last season, which is spring," Fujino said.

Fujino said administrators have mulled over the many potential aspects involved in conducting athletic competition amid a pandemic.

"We discussed all of that, all of those factors, you know — fans, not only fans at games, whether to charge admission or not, whether we'll have enough referees to cover all our events — and then I don't think people realize, but when you combine two seasons that'll entail twice the amount of buses that we need to contract that we need to move our teams if we try to have competitions and the list goes on and on," he said.

"It's a chain reaction to all the different needs to make it happen and I guess we were at the point where I think it became almost, especially at this point, to try and salvage a season at this point would be almost impossible for us, so again, we're trying to focus on the spring," Fujino stated.

The OIA's announcement came in the wake of the HHSAA's decision on Monday to cancel the state tournaments it had planned for March, which would have been the culmination of what it deemed "season 1."

"Fall and winter, I know that the HHSAA combined the two seasons — and when I say ‘HHSAA,' I mean all of us as leagues, right? OIA, BIIF, MIL, KIF and ILH — we collaboratively agreed to try and combine it and see if we could get it going, hoping that the pandemic would get better and not worse by January," Fujino said.

He went on, "Obviously, it's very worse outside of Hawaii, but in Hawaii it seems like it's a steady rate of infections and so forth, after the decision was made to cancel state tournaments, we, as a league decided to cancel the fall and winter league seasons for the OIA."

Previously both fall and winter seasons had been postponed from their original schedule and pushed back to a start date of Jan. 4. After the OIA announced the cancellation of both seasons Tuesday, the Big Island Interscholastic Federation reached the same decision later that afternoon. On Wednesday morning the Maui Interscholastic League executive board followed suit.

Fujino cautioned against coaches conducting unauthorized off-campus practices, workouts and conditioning sessions that are not in accordance with state and county regulations.

"If these are possibly high school coaches in the OIA, it would be a liability issue, because we're not started back up on two fronts: the Department of Education has not re-started athletics, as well as the league, we haven't re-started athletics," he said.

"So these coaches are acting as private individuals, so I think if they're doing that they're assuming personal liability as a private citizen within Hawaii and I mean, if they're willing to take that risk, that's up to them, but I think that's the major concern, that when we have our high school coaches in the OIA, they're not only representing themselves and the community and the high school that they coach at, but also the Hawaii Department of Education that we are all a part of," Fujino said.

He added, "Their actions become part of a bigger responsibility and bigger jurisdiction than just themselves and the five or six kids that they're working out with, so I think that's where my concern is. I hope that they're aware of that and it puts a strain on not just us here on Oahu, but whatever we do in a league and especially if we're a public school, it will affect the public schools statewide, so I think that's the trickling effect of this situation."

Fujino reiterated that the focus going forward will be to conduct a spring sports season, or "season 2" from March to May. Those sports include baseball, golf, judo, softball, tennis, track and field, water polo and boys volleyball.

"Spring (season) was canceled last school year, so we really want to have something to go by in the spring so at least we can have some competition, whether it be just for participation or if we can really have a competitive season," Fujino said. "With competitive seasons, if there's any kind of a postponement of a game due to this COVID, which is occurring, right, both at the pro, college and high school levels, then records would come into play, re-play of games and so forth, which would be very difficult in the short period of time that we have for the season, so we're still working on trying to salvage the spring season at this point."

Fujino said in order for a spring sports season to take place, it would have to be in compliance with both the phase system of the State of Hawaii Department, as well as the City and County of Honolulu's tier system.

"Especially in the spring, not every school in the OIA has their own on-campus field, some of them use county facilities, so we would need to be out of the tier that would allow us to participate in team sports at the parks and I think it's pretty close to the Department of Health's phases as well, so that's probably the major hurdle that we are facing right now and then, of course, we're all public schools in the OIA, I think another (hurdle) is how many students will be attending in-person school and getting all our guidances and protocols cleared up before we actually start workouts and practices on our school campuses," Fujino said.

"There's a lot of very new procedures and it's a new world out there as far as sanitizing and clearing and distancing, the wearing of face-masks, there's going to be a lot of different aspects to going out there and getting on the fields or getting on the courts, so I think those are really big issues, or the major issues that we need to satisfy before we allow our student-athletes to return in a safe way," he stated.