The East Penn Conference will have a winter season, it just won’t start until January. In a move that follows similar footsteps to what the conference did with fall sports, the league announced on Friday that the winter league schedule will now be pushed back a month from an official start date of December 15 to January 15 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a release sent out on Friday, the league announced that the conference’s board of principals voted by a 17-1 margin to postpone the season.

“This difficult decision was made after review and consideration of additional data and advice relating to the current pandemic from both St. Luke’s University Health Network and The Lehigh Valley Health Network,” Whitehall Principal and EPC President Nate Davidson said.

The winter schedule is slated to be released by December 11 and will probably feature a 10-game schedule for basketball, wrestling and swimming, based on divisions, just like they had for sports like soccer, field hockey and volleyball in the fall. That would give each school in the six-team divisions home and away contests within their county alignment. The original winter proposal had teams playing each other three times within the division for a total of 15 games.

The conference currently has six schools (East Stroudsburg South, East Stroudsburg North, Stroudsburg, Freedom, Liberty and Northampton) that have yet to start winter practices.

For the remaining 12 schools in the conference, it will now be up to them to decide if they want to schedule independent games, even if it means playing schools within the EPC. Those decisions will come down to the school district or in the case of Catholic schools, the school administration.