Photo by Erin Nelson.
Athletic Director Jay Mathews speaks about the bass fishing team’s win of the National Championship during a trophy presentation in August at Briarwood Christian School.
Jay Mathews was becoming accustomed to altering the Briarwood Christian School athletic events schedule.
Through much of February and early March, excessive rainfall forced many Briarwood spring sports events to be canceled, rescheduled or postponed. But that’s a dance with Mother Nature that Mathews is at least familiar with. The circumstances he, along with every other education worker in the country, faced in mid-March presented a new challenge.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began sweeping the country, schools began shutting down. As states began making decisions regarding how to proceed, the flow of information was chaotic, to say the least. Mathews said his email, text messages and Twitter timeline all contained varying information.
“You can’t say it was changing daily, it was changing about every 25 minutes, with updates nationally and locally,” said Mathews, the athletic director at Briarwood.
The final Briarwood athletic event to take place was the varsity softball team playing at Homewood on Saturday, March 14, in a game that honored Aniah Blanchard, the 19-year-old Homewood High School graduate and former softball player whose body was found in rural Macon County in November.
“We felt like that was important for them to participate in,” Mathews said.
At the time, schools were slated to be closed for a few weeks, with a hopeful re-opening date of April 6. But as days passed, it became obvious that would not be the case. On March 26, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and state Superintendent Eric Mackey announced schools would remain closed the rest of the spring, including the cancellation of all spring sports.
“Heartbreak for the seniors,” Mathews said of his emotions during that time. “We had some seniors who were set to have some terrific finishes to their careers.”
Briarwood had several spring teams on track to have strong seasons, including the baseball, tennis and soccer teams.
“I will say, our folks handled it really, really well,” Mathews said.
Now that schools have transitioned to virtual learning for the remainder of the school year, Mathews — who also coaches quarterbacks on the varsity football team — has done the same in regards to meeting with players.
“I meet with my QBs on Monday nights for 30 minutes via Zoom,” he said. “We’ve had two meetings [as of early April], and we’ve yet to talk about football. We’ve been praying about grandparents and jobs that were furloughed.”
In his down time, Mathews has accomplished plenty of things, including home improvement projects, learning how to use different technologies and doing other activities to “help me get better.”
The spring teams and student-athletes faced a lack of closure to their seasons. In fall sports — such as football, volleyball and cross-country — coaches are facing the difficult task of attempting to plan for a season that may not start on time, or perhaps happen at all.
“[Coaches] have to be thinking through the best way to encourage their athletes to stay physically fit and stay in touch with one another,” Mathews said.
Mathews is also hopeful this time will give people a renewed perspective on life, he said.
“I’m anticipating record crowds that we’ve never had before,” he said. “I think it’s going to be record attendance, and there will be some celebration that we’re back to some sense of normalcy.”
Mathews said he would give everyone at Briarwood an “A-plus” grade for how they have handled a trying situation.
“I couldn’t be prouder,” he said. “People took an inconvenience and decided to play as a team. Because of that, we may find that we made it a lot less worse than it could have been.”
