After winning a suit to resume youth sports in San Diego County, attorney Stephen Grebing is promising to file suits in other California communities in order to get young athletes back on the playing field.
Grebing, who initially filed the San Diego suit on behalf of two high school seniors, told the Southern California Record that young athletes should have the same rights to play as professional athletes who have been allowed to return to the field. So far, no school districts have weighed-in as parties to the suits in any effort to stop his efforts.
“The only parties to the case are the state and then the county health officials,” he said. “So the school districts aren’t even a part of it.”
While he said the win in San Diego could be seen as a setback for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s general program for dealing with the pandemic, Grebing pointed out that the win simply permits youth sports to be conducted using the same protocols being applied to professional and college teams and athletes.
“Our argument has been, if the state thought that was good enough – and it was safe enough – for those players to play under those guidelines, there’s certainly no reason why they can’t allow high school-aged athletes to do the same,” Grebing said.
In fact, the transmission rates are significantly lower for those under the age of 17 than they are among either college-age athletes or older professional athletes, he said.
“So, our argument is, we’ve got the lowest transmission rate among the three age groups, and yet the most restrictions, and it doesn’t make any medical sense, it doesn’t make any scientific sense,” Grebing said.
In addition, though there have been some incidents of transmission within teams, there had been no reported incidents where younger athletes had transmitted the virus during competition, he said.