Record heat to hit Modesto this week has school coaches taking precautions

With anticipated record heat hitting the Modesto area this week, school coaches and athletic directors say safety will come first for student athletes.

The high Wednesday will be near 103, according to the National Weather Service. That’s just shy of the Modesto record high of 105 degrees, set in 1944. But if the weather service forecast holds true, Thursday and Friday will see records fall. Thursday’s high is expected to be near 105, compared with the record 101 for Sept. 10 set in 1953. Friday is expected to be even hotter, near 107. The Sept. 11 record for Modesto is 101, set in 1979.

“This is expected to be the longest heat wave of the year,” the Sacramento office of the National Weather Service reported Tuesday.

The weekend temperatures should be back in the double digits, though highs still will be near 98 for Saturday and Sunday. But these remaining weekdays are the ones that have coaches acting to keep athletes well hydrated and as cool as possible.

Modesto City Schools athletic director Don Wallace, who’s also Modesto High School’s athletic director and head football coach, said he’s reminded all coaches – and especially at schools where gyms aren’t air conditioned – to make sure students have had plenty of water, to shorten drills, and to be very observant and cautious in general.

“A lot of these kids don’t eat and drink right all day long,” Wallace said. “They need to be taking in the water, and we’ll have more water breaks at practices.”

Even on a hot but not scorching day like Tuesday, when the high was expected to be near 100, the cross country team, for example, did part of its workout in the weight room for strength training, he said. Running was in the shade at Cesar Chavez Park – no big distance run – so the coach could keep an eye on how the students are faring, Wallace said.

As for this week’s football games, the heat was brought up at Tuesday’s Quarterback Club meeting of coaches and will be discussed at a meeting of athletic directors Wednesday.

At least a couple of schools have triple-headers Friday that have freshman teams playing about 3:30 p.m. If scheduling allows those freshman games to be moved to Thursday, later in the day, “I’m sure that will come up,” Wallace said. Another possibility is that if coaches all agree, quarters could be shortened a bit, he said.

Wallace noted that Modesto High – in all black no less – faced Ceres High on Aug. 28 when the temperature was 104. There were no issues then, he said. “Every time they came off the field we’d get water in them … had them pour cool water down their necks.”

Downey High varsity head football coach Jeremy Plaa said he is more concerned with afternoon practices – in the peak heat of the day – than evening games later this week. He’ll have players do drills without helmets and shoulder pads as much as possible, he said, and would shorten practice by 10 or 15 minutes Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday, he plans to cut practice to an hour at most, he said.

Downey’s freshman team plays Thursday at 6 p.m. The JV has the earliest kickoff of the school’s three teams: 5 p.m. Friday. The JV coaches will have more players ready to get into the game so no players are overtaxed, he said.

Players are being encouraged to eat saltier foods during the day and to carry a gallon of water around with them as a reminder to stay hydrated so they don’t cramp up. “If they wait till game time, it’s too late,” Plaa said. “We tell them to eat pretzels and put a lot of mustard on their food.” The team is big on mustard because it has good sodium content and is easy on the stomach, he said.

Davis High School athletic director and head football coach Tim Garcia said he’s taking every precaution to make sure athletes stay hydrated and healthy in the heat. “For football practices, we’ll have a shorter time, players will not be in full pads on days they regularly would be,” he said. “We want to keep them as cool as possible and still get the work done that needs to be done.

“As AD, I’ve given coaches a heads-up on the air quality and temperatures to make sure safety’s first. A lot of my guys are shortening practice time.” Cross country runners, he noted, will stick to the shaded parts of Davis Park.

Davis’ football teams have a triple-header scheduled Friday against Los Banos at Modesto Junior College, with the freshman kickoff at 3:30. He said he’d be attending Tuesday afternoon’s Quarterback Club meeting and “there’s a definite possibility” that early game could be canceled or moved.

Football in Modesto faces a double whammy, said CIF Sac-Joaquin Section Director of Communications Will DeBoard. First, Modesto City Schools has the scheduling challenge of seven schools but just three stadiums. Second, “If somebody misses a big tennis match, you can replay the next day no problem, but football’s a different animal because you have just 11 weeks to play 10 games, so can’t just push one back easily,” he said.

The California Interscholastic Federation does allow some flexibility, DeBoard said. Football teams can play no more than two games in any eight-day period, he said, so the rules mean a game could be pushed back to a Monday or Tuesday. “It’s not perfect, but it’s allowed,” he said. The section doesn’t have any rules on game cancellation because of the heat index, he added. “We’ve never really had games postponed due to heat but have due to fires because of air quality – it happened during the Rim fire.”

As Garcia noted, air quality also is being taken into consideration by coaches during this heat.

Karl Swanberg, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Sacramento, said, “High pressure builds up over us and traps the pollutants, so we’ll get a near-surface, heat-generated froth and above that a high-pressure system. It’s almost like a pressure-cooker situation.”

This story was originally published September 8, 2015 at 3:46 PM with the headline "Record heat to hit Modesto this week has school coaches taking precautions."