Park district has no plans to close Arlington Heights basketball courts, despite crowds

More and more high school and college basketball players have started playing at the recently reopened outdoor courts in Arlington Heights, but their on-court skills and online celebrity have led to large groups of socially-undistanced spectators.

That was the case Tuesday night when YouTube sensation Tristan Jass, who has 1.9 million subscribers on his social media page, brought his talents to Hasbrook Park for a pickup game.

Video circulating on social media shows perhaps hundreds of young people on the sidelines for the game, which Jass proclaimed on Twitter was the "craziest hoop session of all time." He said a video presentation of the contest will be posted to his YouTube page in the coming days.

Park district and police officials said they're not shutting the large gatherings down, for now.

"We are asking people to social distance," said Carrie Fullerton, the park district's executive director. "We are asking that, but unless we receive some Illinois Department of Public Health or Centers for Disease Control or Department of Commerce (and Economic Opportunity) guidelines that would say (shut down), we don't foresee that."

State guidelines allowed the park district to reopen its basketball courts three weeks ago, when the parks staff took chains off nets and reinstalled rims at all parks. But they also put up signs near the courts to remind park users to keep their distance from one another. Indoor gyms are still closed.

At Hasbrook, there's one park counselor on-site on nights and weekends who has been asked to enforce social distancing, Fullerton said.

Police Sgt. Andrew Blevins said an officer visited the park about 7 p.m. Tuesday after the department received a call from someone unhappy with the lack of social distancing. The officer went to the park to talk to those gathered, but because everything was peaceful, the game was allowed to carry on, Blevins said.

Fullerton said she and her staff received hundreds of emails and phone calls from residents asking for basketball courts, playgrounds, Lake Arlington and other amenities to reopen. They've received just as many messages from people who urged caution in reopening plans.

"We recognize in this environment that if we open it, it's going to make a lot of people happy, but some people unhappy as well," she said.