In addition to being ineffective and cumbersome, masks can serve as a disincentive for kids to participate in high-school athletics in the first place.
The kids at Appoquinimink High know what it means when they see Mr. Killingsworth walking the school’s hallways in the fall: He’s on the lookout for new recruits for his wrestling team.
There’s no middle-school feeder system for the Delaware wrestling club, so Rich Killingsworth relies on recruiting newbies when they show up at the school as freshmen.
In particular, he looks for athletes from other sports who could learn a thing or two from a grueling wrestling season, and for tough kids who maybe haven’t had a lot of advantages in life. “I’m trying to get kids in a room that I know is going to benefit them,” Killingsworth said.
Over the years, Killingsworth has been successful in this regard. In 2019, he recruited 23 freshmen wrestlers. But in the years since, the pandemic has posed an obstacle to this objective.
Faced with a statewide mandate that required high-school athletes to wear masks at practice and in competition, along with a number of other pandemic-related restrictions, only one freshman tried out for the team in 2020. The size of his squad was cut almost in half, from about 50 wrestlers pre-pandemic to fewer than 30 in the midst of it. Killingsworth blames the masks.
“I’m out trying to recruit freshmen who have never been on the mat to get into my program, and those kids don’t want to wear a mask,” he said. “It’s hard enough anyway to get them on the mat. So, wearing a mask while they’re trying to learn the sport for them was a no-go.”
For two seasons now, Killingsworth — who in addition to being a wrestling coach is also a public-health consultant and former health scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — has been petitioning state officials to grant a mask exception for wrestlers. He is part of a growing chorus of high-school coaches, athletes, parents, and health professionals who are saying enough is enough to the continued masking of student athletes. These advocates argue that the masks are unnecessary and impractical distractions, and that there’s little evidence to suggest that they actually slow the spread of Covid-19.
An even bigger concern, as Killingsworth found out, is that the masks can serve as a disincentive for kids to participate in high-school athletics at all; they can essentially close an on-ramp to a potentially lifelong appreciation for exercise, hard work, and healthy living.
Killingsworth noted that even before the pandemic, American kids were growing up in environments that promote sedentary behavior and engineer out physical activity. The pandemic exacerbated that, encouraging kids to stay home by themselves in front of screens. A CDC study from September showed the consequences: Children and teens packed on weight at an alarming rate during the pandemic. Keeping children home and inactive as a Covid-avoidance strategy resulted in more of them joining America’s already bulging population of overweight and sedentary kids, which only renders them more vulnerable to the virus.
“When we look at teenagers adopting lifelong behaviors, this is where they begin instilling those behaviors that are very difficult to change as they get older,” Killingsworth said. “Now we’ve only reinforced the concept of them sitting on their butt, not being involved.”
Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a private-practice physician, epidemiologist, and associate researcher in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of California–Davis, said that masks for athletes create more problems than they’re worth.
“Because we don’t know what the worth is,” she said. “We have no studies that show us that they’re effective at preventing Covid transmission, and in fact we have studies that show us they are not effective. If they are (effective), the effect is so small that we can’t detect it.”
‘I Couldn’t Breathe. It Was Terrible.’
It’s unclear exactly how many states, cities, and school districts still require high-school athletes to wear masks while practicing and competing, but many still do, particularly in blue and northeastern states. Delaware, New York, and Connecticut are among the states that still require most high-school athletes to mask up while competing indoors.
The Illinois Department of Health’s Sports Safety Guidance requires masks for indoor-sports training and competition for “individuals aged 2 years and older who can medically tolerate a mask, regardless of vaccination status.” The California Department of Public Health requires masks for athletes who compete in indoor sports, “even during heavy exertion, as practicable.”
There is no statewide masking requirement in Maine, but most local districts have implemented their own mandates. As Maine moves into its winter playoffs, athletes will be required to wear masks while competing indoors, in accordance with recommendations from Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, per Michael Burnham, executive director of the Maine Principals’ Association.
For John Shea, one of Maine’s top high-school basketball players, masks have been a source of frustration for two years now. There was more acceptance last season, before vaccines were widely available, said Shea, who attends Edward Little High School in Auburn.
“This year, I think people are starting to get tired of it,” he said.
When they are worn correctly, over the nose and mouth, the masks make it harder to breathe, Shea said. But, he added, “no one wears them correctly,” as they easily slip down, and regularly get ripped off during games. He estimates that in a recent game he had to replace his mask at least four times because they fell off, got sweaty, or broke.
A photo of Shea’s drive to the basket as he scored his 1,000th career point last month shows that most of the players on the court had their masks below their noses. Shea said the masks are just for show at this point. “The masks aren’t doing much,” he said. “They’re kind of just an accessory.”
Bridget Shea, John’s mom, said referees enforce the mask requirements sporadically and inconsistently. She said she doesn’t hear a lot of grumbling about the masks anymore, they’ve seemingly just become part of Maine’s high-school sports environment.
“I think everybody pretty much thinks it’s ridiculous,” she said. “The kids aren’t really wearing them the way they’re supposed to. They’re down around their chin.”
Attempts by National Review to reach the Edward Little High athletic director on the phone and via email were unsuccessful.
Michael Dowd, the wrestling coach at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., said masks fall off all the time in practice and during matches. He thinks wrestlers unconsciously pull them down to catch their breath, and he and his assistants regularly remind them to pull the masks back up. Some referees are bigger sticklers for mask etiquette than others. He said he’s seen wrestlers not finish their moves because they’re adjusting their mask instead.
One of Dowd’s wrestlers had a panic attack that he said he attributes to wearing a mask.
“I remember wrestling as a kid and just getting a feeling of claustrophobia if I was getting pinned. And for a kid who’s getting pinned and has a mask over their face, I have these freshmen coming to me in tears, like, ‘I couldn’t breathe. It was terrible,’” Dowd said. “You feel like you’re going to die out there anyway without a mask. And so throw a mask on, I can’t imagine.”
Dowd recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News calling for an end to arbitrary Covid rules and a return to normality for high-school wrestlers. Masking wrestlers, he said, is completely ineffective and provides “absolutely zero” protection. “This is different than going to the supermarket,” he said.
“They’re not wearing N95s out there,” Dowd added. “I’ve been saying all along, just show me the science. If you show me the science that, believe it or not, it does help, then I’ll back away in a second and say ‘Okay.’ But to me, this is just like some bureaucrat trying to show that they’re doing something to make it safer.”
A Scientific Void
Masking proponents tend to fall back on recommendations from the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which still calls for masks for athletes in most indoor sports, and for unvaccinated athletes training or competing outdoors. The AAP does not recommend masks for water sports, like swimming and diving, or for gymnastics, tumbling, and wrestling, because they can become choking hazards and can block athletes’ vision.
As several Democratic governors begin to once again roll back indoor-mask mandates, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky continues to push back, telling Reuters this week that “now is not the moment” to drop universal masking in schools and other public places.
Proponents of masking athletes also have pointed to some studies that have found that for healthy people, wearing a mask doesn’t have a substantial impact on exercise performance. But those studies were based on controlled exercise environments, not unruly sporting events, and they didn’t look at the effectiveness of masking kids in sports as a Covid-mitigation strategy.
A study published in January that did look at Covid-19 spread among high-school athletes found a “lack of significant benefit demonstrated for face mask use.” The study, which involved more than 30,000 Wisconsin high-school athletes from more than 200 schools in the fall of 2020, found “no significant associations” between Covid incidence and face-mask use during play.
That study came on the heels of a groundbreaking CDC study in May that found no statistically significant benefit from requiring students to wear masks in the classroom.
Høeg, the private-practice physician, epidemiologist, and researcher, was involved in a study of Covid transmission within a Virginia youth-hockey program in November 2020. The hockey players didn’t wear masks while playing, in part because the masks fogged up the goggles of players who wore eye protection. “There was actually no transmission on the ice during our study period, even during a time of high community spread,” Høeg said.
Høeg noted that the World Health Organization warns against wearing masks during “vigorous physical activity” because they can reduce breathing capacity. She said she’s seen no strong evidence that wearing masks while participating in sports is an effective strategy for preventing coronavirus transmission.
“Kids only have a limited amount of time where they are exposed or able to get into certain sports. It can be totally life-changing for them in terms of opening up opportunities and creating lifelong habits of exercising,” said Høeg, who pointed out that political leaders and public-health officials responded to the pandemic by shutting down youth sports and closing doors to other opportunities for exercise in an effort to slow the spread of the virus.
“Now we’re just prolonging the problem with requiring kids to wear masks,” she said. “Kids are not going to want to keep going back to a sport if they think it’s uncomfortable and they don’t like being there.”
Feeling Safe vs. Being Safe
Early in the pandemic, before the 2020–21 wrestling season, Killingsworth conducted his own study in conjunction with the National Wrestling Coaches Association to see if wrestlers who train and compete without facial coverings were more likely to contract Covid-19. The study involved 690 wrestlers in five states who regularly competed in tournaments where no facial coverings were required. Over three months in the summer of 2020, only seven of the wrestlers tested positive for the coronavirus, well under the national average for positivity at the time, according to a summary of the study.
Killingsworth said the study was evidence that masking high-school wrestlers is unnecessary. “This population in general has a very high resilience to viral positivity and spread anyway,” he said. The study was used as part of the “Return to Wrestling” guidelines proposed by Delaware coaches in November of 2020. The guidelines recommended allowing wrestlers to return to practice and competition without masking requirements. That didn’t happen.
Killingsworth tried again last fall to convince state athletic authorities to allow wrestlers in Delaware to practice and compete without masks, pointing out wording in Democratic governor John Carney’s emergency order that offers an exemption to masking during activities where they are “not feasible, such as swimming.”
In December, Killingsworth filed a legal complaint with the Delaware Department of Education. It was denied. In a letter, Christine Alois, Delaware’s acting secretary of education, wrote that high-school wrestlers wore masks in matches last year, so therefore “it is feasible for student-athletes to safely compete while wearing masks.”
Killingsworth called that line of reasoning “ridiculous.” Just because masks were required last year doesn’t mean they are “feasible” as an effective anti-Covid measure. The masks come down and fall off during training and competitions. They encourage wrestlers to touch their faces. They distract the athletes while they are competing. Athletes suck in the masks when they breathe. And teens – not generally known as their rule-following anyway – get creative, in some cases poking holes in their masks to let more air through, and wearing loose fitting masks that don’t seal their faces, Killingsworth said.
Another, more disgusting problem: The masks get dirty and keep bacteria and fungus on wrestlers’ faces. “I’ve had a higher incidence of facial skin infections this year, from mat herpes to impetigo to ring worm on the face than I have had Covid in the room,” Killingsworth said.
Killingsworth said it’s clear the masks don’t work as an effective anti-Covid intervention.
“It’s eye candy. It looks good, but logically it fails,” he said. “It’s kind of an age-old public-health tactic, which is the idea of keeping people feeling safe.”
Public-health experts, Killingsworth argued, shouldn’t use deception as an intervention tactic.
“We’re not serving the public well here,” he said. “If we’re going to allow them to play, allow them to play in the uniform as intended, versus a facial covering that does nothing to prevent the spread of Covid.”