PSJ-Blountstown game canceled due to positive test
One of the season's most highly-anticipated annual high school football matchups is officially off – at least for the regular season.
The upcoming Blountstown-Port St. Joe football game scheduled for Friday in Blountstown has been canceled due to COVID-19 issues with the Tiger Sharks football team.
A Port St. Joe player was found to have tested positive on Sunday morning and 13 other players have been put in quarantine through contact tracing. The 14 total players affected account for more than half of the 26-player Port St. Joe roster.
"We felt it was in the best interest of the student-athletes and the school to cancel the game with Blountstown and give them plenty of time to find an opponent, which they have, and for us to evaluate our situation and try to make the best decision we could for our program," Tiger Sharks coach Tanner Jones said Monday.
Blountstown has replaced Port St. Joe on the schedule with Florida A&M, who the Tigers will play host to on Friday. PSJ and Blountstown still could play each other this season should the brackets break their way in the Sunshine State Athletic Conference Playoffs or in the 1A state playoffs.
The two teams did have a regular season matchup canceled in 2018 as a result of Hurricane Michael only to later face off in the state playoffs. Jones said he hopes that the two teams can find their way onto the field together at some point this year, for players' sake if nothing else.
"The kids are disappointed," he said. "The Blountstown-St. Joe game is a big rivalry. Since I've been here asking past players what game they remember the most and what game do they look forward to, it's always Blountstown. It's just a huge game they look forward to every year. Hopefully something happens and we match up and get to play in the SSAC conference or maybe the state series. I know the kids on both sides really want to get to play the game."
For now, the primary concern for Port St. Joe is finding a way to not lose next week's game against Wewahitchka scheduled for Oct. 16. Jones said that the idea of playing the game the next day on a Saturday has been floated, though even that would be difficult with so many PSJ players under quarantine.
The player who tested positive will be under a 10-day quarantine, with the other players in for 14 days dating back to their last contact with the positive player. The Tiger Sharks would have the ability to pull from their junior varsity team, which plays its last game of the season on Thursday.
Even still, there's no guarantee that the Tiger Sharks will have enough players ready to play by next week to move forward with the game.
"The next day or two we're gonna have a lot more information and be able to make a better decision," Jones said. "We just don't want to rule out the game right now."
For the time being the varsity team is shutting everything down, locking up the field and the weight room for the rest of this week.
"It's like a vacation for us, I guess," Jones said. "It gives us a great time to clean up the locker room and make sure all the jerseys are hung up. We've been wearing those white jerseys a lot, so hopefully we can freshen them up a little bit. We'll do what we can. It won't be much, but we'll do anything we can do. We will get to go scout, so that will be fun. We'll get to go watch somebody else play for the first time this year."
Jones said the situation didn't come as a shock, with every coach around the state anticipating at least the possibility of canceled or postponed games before the season. But the timing of it, according to Jones, is a bit of a silver lining.
"I feel like we've been kind of lucky in that we haven't really had any cases really since February, but it was a matter of time before it happened," he said. "I guess we're lucky it happened now instead of three weeks from now. I'd hate for it to happen when the playoffs start. Hopefully it will run through St. Joe and we'll be over it and ready to go."