Pictured above: MHC Lacrosse during their 2019-2020 season. Image courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Athletics.
By Katie Goss ’23
Staff Writer
Mount Holyoke College’s varsity and club sports began in-person practices on Feb. 1. Only student-athletes currently on campus can attend in-person practices run by the coaches. To stay within the guidelines set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NCAA, several changes have been made to usual team practice protocol.
Athletes and coaches are required to maintain social distancing and wear a mask at all times while at practice. For some sports, especially close contact sports, this has changed the way practices are conducted.
After being remote for almost a whole year, coaches such as Miriam Esber, the head lacrosse coach at Mount Holyoke, have taken this time to build up student-athletes’ fitness levels.
“We are starting off a little bit slower than we normally do,” Esber said. “We are obviously keeping spac[e] right now. At some point, we are hoping to be able to do more … contact-driven drills, which will allow us to be able to play the actual sport of lacrosse rather than just [work] on fundamentals.”
Some sports practices such as tennis have not been as severely affected, as their sport naturally keeps players at a distance.
According to Aldo Santiago, the head tennis coach at Mount Holyoke, the main difference from pre-pandemic practices to now is how the team gathers for instruction. “Because [of] the practices themselves, pre-COVID[-19] and now in COVID[-19], we were far apart from each other. Tennis itself hasn’t changed; you play far away from your opponent.”
The decision to bring back in-person practices was a “long and arduous road,” Lori Hendricks, the director of athletics at Mount Holyoke, said. “There were a lot of questions and a lot of uncertainties to overcome, but we got to this point due to the hard work of the faculty and staff within our department and colleagues across campus. First and foremost, we continued to adjust through the College’s process of returning students to campus. We did not expect 100 percent of our student-athletes to return, but we did have many individuals expressing an interest in returning to campus to begin training for the future.”
Coaches were given an option for whether they wanted to hold in-person practices or not. They were told that it could be handled and adjusted by the athletics department if they did not feel comfortable holding them. However, according to Hendricks, coaches wanted to return out of hope for possibly competing in championships and competitions. This decision of whether or not to do so has not been made official yet by NEWMAC.
According to Santiago and Esber, the coaches wanted to bring back in-person practices in any way they could while keeping the necessary safety measures in place.
“I don’t think it was really about a choice or not. I think we wanted to have in-person practices, … so that was something that wasn’t really a ‘Do you want to?’ or ‘Do you not want to?’ but [a] ‘Yes, we will be doing them,’” Esber said.
“That was one of the reasons to bring student-athletes back,” Santiago said. “That we were [going] to start practices. I don’t think there was a coach that was against in-person coaching. We were looking forward to doing that. I don’t want to speak on behalf of all the coaches, but through my conversations, this was the objective as much as possible: to start in-person practices.”
Along with masks and social distancing, the number of student-athletes allowed at each practice has also been limited. However, since most teams have a portion of their usual student-athletes remote, the number of those attending in-person practice fits within the largest number of students allowed at a practice. In addition, athletic trainers and administrators monitor the Kendall Sports and Dance Complex during “peak hours” to ensure the rules are being followed, according to Hendricks.
For varsity sports, two allotted times have been given for teams to practice: either between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m or 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Additionally, each team is given 114 days of practice, which include in-person training, team bonding and anything done on Zoom as a team. Track and field are given 144 days of practice. Club sports have a different practice schedule and get together either once or twice a week.
Ireland Kennedy ’21 is a student-athlete and captain of the basketball and track and field teams. Although COVID-19 has limited her senior year experience as a student-athlete, she is happy to be back practicing in person.
“To be able to get up in the morning and know that I am walking to the gym, and I have a team to go and train with, is awesome,” Kennedy said. “Having that support and being able to know that you have a coach that is going to help correct you, … [and] having someone yell, ‘Yeah yoke!’ in the appropriate setting is fantastic.”
As a multi-sport student-athlete, though, Kennedy had to choose between which sport she wanted to take part in physically this year. Student-athletes this semester are only permitted to partake in in-person participation on one team. For their other teams, they are limited to participating virtually or on team bonding days.
Kennedy chose to practice in-person with the track and field team. “That was honestly the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make as a student-athlete,” Kennedy said. “[It’s] nothing that I would ever want to have anybody go through. But a lot of people are in the same position that I am currently. It’s a safety thing, really, because of the nature of a lot of the sports.”
Kennedy not only attends her basketball meetings via Zoom to participate in the team as much as she can, but she also lives in the same dorm as most of her basketball teammates. She explained that when student-athletes were requesting room assignments, they tried to pick the same dorm to be in “pods.” This is so that if a team contracted COVID-19, it would be contained to one dorm, and it would be easier to manage contact tracing. When applying, she intended to participate in both sports but was later told she had to pick one.
“Anything and everything that I can do, I will be doing with basketball. I am one of their captains, so I want to still be there in that way and in that role, and obviously, just as a teammate, I want to be there for them. … I still see them very much as my team,” Kennedy said. “Even though I am with track and field physically, and I am also their captain and doing their responsibilities and whatnot, I am definitely still with both in the levels that I am able to.”
A student on the volleyball team, Brayden Walden ’21, noted the differences in her team’s five practice days a week. Although they still run drills and are able to play as they did before COVID-19, they are not allowed to celebrate as they once did.
“We are a very celebratory team, so we can’t do huddles or high fives or anything like that anymore,” Walden said.
Additionally, student-athletes are not allowed to keep their equipment in lockers and have to carry everything back and forth from practice to their dorms. For the volleyball team, this means carrying their stretch and roll-out equipment five days a week back and forth.
Santiago mentioned that his team was supposed to begin practice on Feb. 8 but was so excited that they ended up starting on Feb. 1 with most other teams.
“We had a meeting, and everyone was so excited to be here and to be able to practice that we as a group said, ‘You know what? Let’s start the first [of February],’” he said.
Walden mentioned that she had not seen her team or been on campus for over a year, as she was studying abroad in the spring of 2020, so she said she felt she was the most excited teammate to be back on campus and in practice.
“While they [the team] were together in the spring for a little bit, I physically had not been back on campus for an entire year,” Walden said. “It’s definitely nice to have practice and see my team and actually be there in person with each other to deal with this all.”
Esber mentioned how much she likes seeing everyone in person after many months apart.
“It’s been really nice to see people in person, communicate with people in person. Obviously, there is a big difference in communicating with a group of people over Zoom versus communicating with them in person, so that’s been a really nice change,” she said. “It’s just nice to get back to coaching and teaching the fundamentals and just pushing the players right now.”
“For many, this was the end of almost a year without sports in their lives,” Hendricks said. “For our student-athletes to be able to come to Kendall at least once a day to reconnect with teammates, train and … provide them some type of ‘normal’ has greatly benefited their well-being and hopefully has allowed them to better focus on their classwork.”
Walden highlighted not only how happy she was to be back with her teammates that were on campus and getting to finish her senior season, but also her gratitude for the athletics department and everyone who made these in-person practices possible.
“The athletics department is doing [a good job] at Mount Holyoke as far as allowing us to practice. … All the faculty in there and all of the custodians who work in the athletics center; … they’ve all been doing such a good job of making sure that we get to practice and all the seniors are going to have a season and everyone is going to get to do something, because they know how much we all care about it,” she said.
Despite the changes made to athletics this season, Kennedy highlighted that she still felt grateful for the time she has now with her teammates.
“I think there is a lot that we all picture for our seasons and COVID[-19] has taken away a lot of that, but I think there is a lot to be said for what we can gain from our teammates,” Kennedy said. “I have thought about how much love and care I have for both of my teams and how lucky I feel to have two.”