TL;DR After March 13th games, mask policy update:
- ON-ICE masks move to recommended/optional (barring a steep increase in cases or changes in CDC/PHMDC guidelines for Dane County).
- Keep masks on in the locker-room and in other areas of the rink.
Watching cases drop and the county take its masks off, we want to carefully consider our policies with regards to masks. We want to protect our most vulnerable players, we want to watch what happens with cases over the next two weeks, and we want to give everyone a sense of what will happen moving forward while also considering our players who find it difficult to play with a mask on.
Starting after the March 13th games, we will update our mask requirement to masks recommended ON-ICE ONLY. This means one more game for each team with masks required on-ice (March 6th and March 13th are split due to ice availability). This is similar to the UW-Madison, MMSD, and MSCR timelines. If you need or want to keep your mask on-ice after March 13th, please do so.
We will keep masks on in the locker room and lobby areas and in the Eagle’s Nest when not eating or drinking. Locker rooms are enclosed and have 10-15 of us in close proximity. The lobby can get crowded and people have to move through it to enter and exit the building. Our most vulnerable players do not have a choice of avoiding the lobby like they do for the Eagle’s Nest.
We are all in different places regarding risk and masks, as demonstrated by the survey results below. Please respect everyone’s comfort level and follow our policies.
We will be carefully watching the PHMDC Covid dashboard and hopefully watching cases continue to decline. We will reconsider this policy if there is a steep increase in cases and cases go back over 100 per week (that is the line where PHMDC put the mask mandate in place last summer).
Further info:
Thank you to the 97 of you who responded to this question and to those who will complete the survey over the next few days https://forms.gle/5c3qsEL4hg1TpWA48. We will publish the full results next week.