Rothes chairman Iain Paul believes the current coronavirus risks are too great for the Highland League to consider restarting soon.
Football below the Championship Scotland is currently suspended as a result of decisions taken by the SFA and Scottish Government to try to combat the spread of Covid-19.
The next update on a possible lower league restart is set for March 1.
Although Rothes as a club haven’t discussed the current situation in recent weeks, Mackessack Park chief Paul’s personal view is that it will be difficult to complete the 2020-21 Highland League campaign.
He said: “I think there are more difficult decisions ahead and as a club we haven’t actually discussed it for five or six weeks.
“As a club we’ll discuss it again, but personally I’ve never been particularly comfortable with just kicking the can down the road all the time.
“I think sometimes you just have to make a decision and live by it.
“It’s all about risk and at the end of the day duty of care lies with me and I’m not convinced that the risks are going to be reduced soon.
“I don’t see how anybody can say with any confidence that there’s not going to be risk involved.
“What we’ve got to remember as well at our level is that football is secondary to boys’ jobs.
“Their employers were probably fairly relaxed when the prevalence of the virus wasn’t that great up here, but in more recent weeks and months it’s become a different thing.
“Employers you might find would be putting boys under a bit of pressure, maybe not so much initially, but if players have to isolate – let alone catch the virus – then that could have quite a knock-on effect.
“Personally, I just feel we’re stretching it a bit in terms of our position of importance.
“The first place we need to start is assessing the risk of players picking up the virus playing for Rothes, or any other team, and taking it home to their families.
“That’s the most important thing and you knock that on to committee, officials and supporters as well.
“For me, it’s always been a difficult balancing act. I err on the side of caution and personally I think the risks are too great for us to be thinking about starting again just now.”
Rothes won the 2019-20 Highland League Cup last October before the new campaign started a month later.
But Paul admits the Speysiders gave serious consideration to not restarting and sitting out this term like fellow Moray side Forres Mechanics.
He added: “The difficulty we had right at the beginning was that the club was of a mind that, if there was no fans, we wouldn’t play, end of story.
“But we compromised on that by agreeing to play in the Highland League Cup, but our thinking initially was very much aligned with Forres.
“They took the step of shutting down and fair play to them. I’ve got total respect for that decision and that’s where we were minded.
“The fear was that once the decision was made for the league to start we were reluctant as a club to step out and take the same route as Forres, because we were in fear of losing our players and our management who had an appetite to carry on.
“We made the decision on the basis that we felt we’d come a long way in the last five years and we didn’t really want to undo that and start again.
“That’s what we felt the prospect might be, it was a difficult decision for everyone for a number of reasons.”
