Student Athletes Reflect on COVID Challenges

With COVID preventing people from meeting in-person with their family, friends, and teams, it made it hard for athletes to train and improve their craft. Athletes have had a variety of obstacles and challenges that, with the help of their friends and family, they were able to overcome.

Freshman Max Roberts, a rugby and soccer player, said he “worked out and tried to do stuff in [his] front yard. However, he experienced trouble “trying to get motivation” to keep up with his training.

He added, “training with [his] friends” helped him and he wishes he “start[ed] earlier instead of waiting a couple of months” into the pandemic. With soccer tryouts coming up, he believes the extra work in his front yard and with friends is going to pay off on the field.

Freshman soccer player Devan Abeyta said, to continue his training, he “ran miles with his dad and played lots of soccer… usually I like training with someone and my parents were sometimes busy and I couldn’t see my friends, so that was a challenge I had to overcome.”

The work in the offseason running with his dad and playing soccer with friends and family wasn’t easy, even boring at times, but he worked through it.

Abeyta added, “My parents [helped me] because they motivated me and my friends motivated me to get outside more… I would have exercised more so I could get in preparation for the next soccer season and also for Campo sports.”

Freshman Brendan Baldelli a football, soccer and baseball player, explained, “I practiced by playing catch with my brother, dad, mom and sometimes with friends, and some difficulties were that it’s hard to get motivation because you can actively see your friends and it’s really tough to get friends to hang out and practice with.”

“Some things that helped me were my parents. They honestly helped motivate me to take sports more seriously,” said Baldelli. “At the start of covid my friend did gamespeed and I wish I would of started it earlier because it’s a good program.” The time off due to the COVID pandemic was a great time to build up stamina and muscle strength, and Baldelli used this to his advantage.

Junior Logan Robeson said, “What motivated me was just knowing that there were other people out there that were just sort of being taken over by the circumstances and allowing themselves to stop training completely and just trying to get ahead.”

“It was maining strength exercises in my garage or ball handling… because resources in terms of gym time were just so scarce,” added Robeson.

With the pandemic challenging people’s motivations to train, these athletes fought through it and found a way to get the best out of a time where many ways to practice were unavailable.