As a team sport athlete, I am very used to and deeply enjoy being in the presence of others: my teammates, my coaches, my adoring fans, etc.. Therefore, my experience in quarantine has been extremely jarring and unpleasant. Not only stripped of the closure to my high school softball career, I suffered the loss of potentially having the best season ever in PALY history. The great wins and triumphs which were in my inevitable future are now only in my imagination; thinking of such saddens me. However, even if we don’t have the audiences, seasons, or endings that we wanted, we still have sports. Sports following the CDC recommended social distancing measures, of course.

Instead of lacing up cleats and donning personal padding, we will be stepping into hazmat suits and competing to see who can inject lysol directly into the trachea the fastest, with the winner taking home the prize of 1 free week in the ICU. In the absence of professional sports I have resorted to a multitude of substitutes to fill this sudden void. Those substitutes include but are not limited to marble racing, countless hours of the 2003 gem: Madden NFL Street, and the race to see which one of my family members are going to lose their mind first in quarantine (I’m certainly winning that one).

If you’re basic and needing a sports fix thus far in quarantine, you may have brushed the dust off the Townie you haven’t touched since the eighth grade, biked around the Baylands, and called yourself a cyclist, or perhaps you consider walking around the block to be a sport. Boring. There are many better sport options to do that can still adhere to quarantine codes. For example, swimming could totally come back and athletes could compete in meets if we replace the pool water with purell so the athletes are constantly disinfected. Additionally, sports like lacrosse, baseball, and softball should be able to resume because all of our helmets have masks, and masks have been used in this crisis to help curtail the spread of the virus. 

Forward thinking, however, sports as we have known and loved them will probably have to adapt to a new world haunted by corona. Perhaps tag outs go out of fashion, and you just throw the ball at the runner instead? Maybe the exciting aggression, contact, and physicality of athletics are replaced by standing six feet away from the opposing team. Or say, long distance running gets really hot because it is perfect for corona time. I mean isn’t the whole goal to get as far away from everyone else lol? Anywho, the future of sports and in general is very uncertain. Stay active and stay safe.