Noah Ruston is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Scottsdale Prep Academy forAZPreps365.com

With smaller crowd capacities, game cancellations, and required mask mandates, Scottsdale Prep coaches and administrators are preaching to their athletes the ability to overcome their COVID-fractured season as it will carry over to other parts of their life.

“Students will follow what their leaders do,” said Duane Ediger, the athletic director at Scottsdale Prep. “The leaders being our coaches, our staff, myself included, and parents. Each of those adult leaders are going to be the example of what students follow. If we come across as positive and having a good attitude towards the whole situation, that's going to carry over to students.”

The optimism spread around the school has been contagious from the beginning, with more students getting involved with sports.

The athletic director believed in the summer that the school would lose “about a third” of the total sports participation from normal. But that has not happened.

“We are for some sports getting more students out than we have in past years,” said Ediger. “For our football team this fall, we had 40 kids for our school which is the most we ever had out for a high school football team. For most of our sports we are at the norm’ or maybe even a little above. So overall our numbers are good.”

Some challenges have been more prevalent than others with this season, but one continues to stand out the most, according to Ediger.

“I think the main one is the wearing of masks during competition when the student is participating in competition has been the most difficult issue that we have had to overcome.”

He believes basketball would be most difficult while wearing the mask while participating because he "hears more complaints from the parents and students a little bit more, but all sports definitely deal with the issue.”

First year basketball coach Jeffery Slump has pushed the message to his players “you can only control what you control.”

His view of wearing the mask while playing games is “everybody has to do it. It is not something unique or isolated only to us. It is something that you have the ability to still play but here is the change. It's no different than three seconds in the lane, there is out of bounds, there are violations. There is all sorts of stuff. It’s just part of the game at this point.”

With daily uncertainty about player’s health and potential game cancellations, his preparation has not really changed.

“We focus on three main things,” said Slump. “Our focus is attitude, effort, and communication. The foundation of what we do involves those three things. We have taken from day one, we have to maintain a positive attitude no matter what.”

The Spartans coach is embracing the opportunity to mentor and mature his young team. The coach’s focus is to use basketball as an outlet for these players to compete, but also to learn about life.

“Believe it or not, I think this has been very difficult several months, but it's going to teach them a lot,” Slump said. “This is how life works.”