By Bob Grotz
Eagles Pro Bowl tight end Zach Ertz interrupted his Zoom conference Friday to urge the PIAA not to give in to Gov. Tom Wolf’s recommendation that high school sports in Pennsylvania be shelved until January 2021.
Ertz challenged the governor, the PIAA, state health authorities and high schools to find a way to preserve sports for high school athletes.
“I want to touch on one thing,” Ertz said almost out of nowhere. “The PIAA is talking in about 30 minutes. I just want to talk a little bit about high school football. My experiences, I was 15 years old, my parents separated. I was the oldest of four boys and the only thing that I knew how to do, the only thing I could do to express myself — I was so frustrated inside — the only thing I could do was play football.
“I focused, all I did was lift weights, play football and play basketball. And that allowed me to kind of release my internal kind of stress and pressure that I have built up. And Tom Wolf yesterday came out with the recommendation that there is no fall football or fall sports in general. The adversity I faced when I was 15 is about one 1,000th of what many kids in this day in particular, are going to be facing if they don’t have an outlet, if there is no football in the fall for these kids.”