Childress chases championships for ‘20

It’s possible that no one will be more ready to see the 2019-20 school year come to an end than Bernard Childress.

Considering that thought, though, the Columbia native responded recently as only he could:

“To me, I look at it as a challenge. And to my knowledge, I’ve never walked away from one.”

In his 12th year as executive director of the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, the 64-year-old Childress — inducted last fall into the Columbia Central athletics hall of fame — was out of the Hermitage office for the entire month of October undergoing and recovering from back surgery.

As he started to get back on his feet from the fall, the coronavirus pandemic threw high school athletics statewide into silence, stalling the Division I girls and boys basketball state tournaments at Middle Tennessee State’s Murphy Center and putting spring sports in jeopardy.

The earlier issue, in his mind, hasn’t been nearly the concern as the latter one.

“Our staff stepped up and did what they needed to do,” Childress said of his October absence. “I give all of them credit for doing what needed to be done. They did a fantastic job with that.”

The current situation has been a different matter altogether.

“It’s tough. But you’ve still got to stay focused and try to make the best decisions for the safety of the kids we’re responsible for,” he said, reflecting on the call to stop the girls basketball tourney following the March 12 state quarterfinal games.

“Listening to the right people; I think that’s (the key) more than anything — having those people that are willing to talk and spending a lot of time on conference calls, people at the National Federation that have access to infectious disease people that we probably wouldn’t have access to. We’ve been on a couple of calls with people from the (Center for Disease Control). When you have people like that giving you advice and recommending what they think needs to be done, you’ve got to take their advice and make the right decision.”

As a former athlete, the decision to potentially end an athlete’s pursuit of a state championship isn’t one Childress takes lightly.

“I get up every morning, just praying to make the right decisions, asking God to give me the wisdom to make the right decisions for these young people,” he said. “That’s always been my approach. I’m going to do what I think is right for young people. If the adults don’t like it, they can get over it. But we’re trying to do the best thing for the most young people that are involved. That’s the attitude you definitely have to have.”

That’s the approach that has Childress and his staff working on a plan that would allow the basketball and spring sports championships to be completed, should classes resume for the ’19-20 school year.

“I’ve had people say, ‘why is the TSSAA still holding on to the possibility of a spring season, the possibility to finish the basketball tournament?’ My response is, ‘why not?’,” he said. “What we’ve been working on and what we’ll continue to work on is, if schools reconvene, how far (into the calendar) can we go to give those student-athletes who have worked so hard for their spring season some type of limited regular season? How far out can we go that makes sense? How far out can we go in working with MTSU and all the people in Rutherford County as far as our basketball tournament is concerned?

“We’re working on that and we’ll continue to work on that until someone says school’s out for the year. Nobody has said that yet. Why would we not do what we’re trying to do? I just feel like we owe that to those kids, to not just give up right now.”

That effort hasn’t been wasted on the athletes whose seasons are currently in limbo.

“We as a staff have probably received more e-mails from the student-athletes themselves than from coaches,” Childress said. “The majority of my e-mails from student-athletes, in both basketball and spring sports, have been ‘thanks for not giving up on us, and if it doesn’t work, we understand’.

“During this time, what else are we doing? We’re working. We’re not working on eligibility, we’re not working on spring sports, we’re not working on hardships. Why wouldn’t we be working to see – if this happens, if we get back to some sort of normalcy, can we make this work? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but we haven’t hurt anybody.”