There really should be some clarity and they should just announce that no competitions will occur this fall. End of story.
Yes, in terms of death and severe illness, children seem to be at an extremely low risk. But I think it's short-sighted to use that as the only barometer to assess risk to the community. We still don't know the exact transmissions rates for asymptomatic kids with some preliminary studies suggesting kids from ages to 10 to 18 spread it just as easily as adults. And with kids under 10, they've been mostly locked down for the past 6 months, so we simply don't know yet.
The concern isn't necessarily my daughter is going to die from playing an outdoor scrimmage. The concern is if she picks up COVID and becomes a asymptomatic carrier and brings it home. I have hypertension. So while my daughter is in the very low risk category, i'm definitely higher risk. Our kids don't get to play soccer in a bubble. Parents pick them up and they live at home with adults who may be older or have underline conditions. Especially in middle / lower income communities, the adults may have health conditions that are undiagnosed. So until we have more concrete data, I think it's prudent to be overly cautious.
As for other states running youth competitions, a few people brought up Texas and Arizona as good examples.. I'm not sure why we're using them as good examples for running youth competitions when they've just had huge surges in cases. Our tracing system is almost non-existent, so we don't really know what the primary vectors of transmission are. It seems we're only effective at tracking hospitalizations and deaths and transmissions up to one degree of separation at this point. Yes indoor bars/clubs are high risk, but there's little data on things that might spread at a moderate/low level.
Also unlike other states, we (California) have several HUGE metropolitan areas, so the stakes are higher. We're not as dense as New York, so I din't think we'll ever see things accelerate like it did over there. But due to our huge population with diverse communities and local governments, if things go really sideways, it'll be very hard to put things back in the toothpaste. We're not like some Midwest state with 1-2 mid-size/large cities surrounded by empty space. Locking down one city basically stops their COVID cases. We have large and small communities sprawled out everywhere. In SoCal, you can't drive for more than 5 minutes and not end up in another city or community. It's why when OC restricted training for youth sports, a bunch of OC clubs flooded into the north county of SD. It's very easy for us to move around to other large communities. This means California can't have the same guidelines as Kansas or Utah. New York brought their numbers down by being extremely draconian. It sucked but it was necessary due to the high density of their population. Our overly cautious guidelines also suck, but I also think it's necessary given our population, geography, and diversity. We have to have guidelines that are suited for California, not Arizona.
I love soccer. My kids love soccer. I definitely miss watching them play. But the one upside to this situation is that my daughter has discovered other things she loves as well. The break from endless traveling, training, and tournaments has created space for her to explore other interests. The attitude of us parents can also affect our child's well-being during the pandemic. If we're constantly sulking and complaining about the unfairness of everything, then our kids will feed off that negativity and be miserable as well. Let's not define our kid's happiness by whether they can play in Surf Cup at the end of September or in Presidio/CSL/SCDSL/DPL/GDA/MLSDA/ECNL/NPL this fall. Just encourage them to still get touches and exercise but let them explore various interests that they would normally never have time to do. Focus on trying to make this fall school year at least somewhat comfortable whether it's online only or in-person distance learning, that's going to be a challenge in itself.
Just in terms of priorities with everything your child has to deal with and the uncertainty with the pandemic I think fall soccer competitions rank pretty low. Someone needs to put their big boy/girl pants on and just announce in a clear declarative sentence that every youth club will understand, "THERE WILL BE NO YOUTH COMPETITIONS IN 2020". Done. The remaining 4 months of 2020 will be focused on training with hopefully the return of competitions in 2021, which should be ample prep time for organizers and for consumer confidence to return.