Thanks, but no thanks seemed to be the message delivered by state officials to the Illinois High School Association Tuesday.

Following a special board meeting last week, the IHSA extended an invitation to Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Public Health to attend their monthly board meeting Thursday (Nov. 19) with hopes of opening a dialogue to potentially reach a solution in regard to the conundrum surrounding winter sports in Illinois.

However, those advances were denied. 

“The IDPH and governor’s office have declined our invitation to join our board meeting, to talk about the basketball situation,” IHSA Executive Director Craig Anderson told the Peoria Journal Star. “They say they are not available. No representatives are coming. We have offered to schedule a meeting with them at a time they can attend and they have not responded to us.”

The IHSA wanted to discuss winter sports, specifically the basketball season, as the two sides have differing opinions on when and how it can take place. The original plan from the IHSA was to play a normal winter season, with practices beginning Nov. 16 and games starting two weeks later. However, Pritzker and the IDPH reclassified basketball as “high-risk” activity from its previous classification as “medium-risk” and recommended the season be moved, potentially to the spring. Officials from the IHSA deviated from that suggestion and announced they would proceed as scheduled, as they believe they have a plan in place to operate in a safe manner. Pritzker retorted by suggesting that schools could open themselves to legal liabilities and also risk funding cuts from the Illinois State Board of Education if they decided to play against the IDPH guidelines.

In addition to the declining of the invitation by the IHSA, Pritzker’s press secretary released a statement to the Journal Star Tuesday afternoon, stating that the governor’s office “is incredibly busy responding to the second wave of coronavirus that has swept the Midwest. IHSA and members of our administration have an open line of communication and have had one since the start of the pandemic response. The trajectory of this virus is not moving in the right direction and it would be premature for the administration to opine about the distant future when so much of the very near future will be dedicated to preventing further spread of this deadly virus and saving lives. Currently, any group activity where you interact with others poses a high risk due to alarmingly high positivity rates across the state.”

Despite the inability to talk with state officials, the meeting will go on as scheduled, as the IHSA will now try to come up with their next course of action.

“We are going to move forward (with the IHSA meeting and decisions), because we have to give our member schools some sort of instruction,” Anderson said. “We are not getting an opportunity to discuss this with state officials. We will have to determine what our best course of action is, whether or not we should do something to adjust a season. A significant number of our schools have indicated they are reluctant to play without the state’s approval.”