‘Honestly, it’s a relief.’ How some at Winthrop reacted to Big South’s COVID-19 plan
The Winthrop volleyball team learned of the decision via Zoom video call on Tuesday night, a matter of hours before the news broke Wednesday morning.
Head coach Chuck Rey remembers a silence on that call. Not really a surprise, or a sadness. For a few moments after he delivered his players the inevitable news — that the Big South Conference would postpone its fall sports to the spring due to COVID-19 concerns, following the lead of the Big 10 and the Pac 12 on Tuesday and other conferences before them — it was just quiet, he said.
“They knew it was coming,” Rey told The Herald. “It was more just a matter of when.”
Rey later added: “Honestly, it’s a relief.”
Big South coaches and players, including those on Winthrop volleyball, have positive and negative takeaways from the conference’s decision on Wednesday.
Positively, for the first time in a preseason greyed by a “fluid” schedule bent to the whim of a pandemic, Big South teams had direction. There was a plan. There was an additional five months for players to bond, mature and grow, making up for the truncated offseason last spring when the pandemic first emerged. Freshmen have a chance to get acclimated to university life, and seniors, who are making post-graduation preparations, have the information and time to make a decision about their next move.
Morgan Bossler, Winthrop volleyball’s senior captain and a big part of the Eagles’ Big South tournament championship in 2019, told The Herald that the team worked out together Wednesday morning, even after the players knew their season would be postponed. She said the team is adopting a new mentality, now that their workout schedules aren’t pending week to week: “Think of this as the spring season.”
“It’s definitely been a little bit frustrating, I’d say,” Bossler said. “At some points during the time we’ve been practicing, whether we could practice or not the next week has been up in the air, so that’s been difficult to kind of work through. And then, just in general, at some point, you could hit a plateau knowing that you don’t really know what you’re working toward, and when you’re going to get to play again.
“So it’s been difficult, but I am really proud of everyone. I think we’ve stayed pretty motivated, and pretty focused on just the next time we get to play, whenever that may be.”
Isabel Schaefbauer, a freshman who enrolled at Winthrop in the 2020 spring and has thus only known a college life dimmed by the coronavirus, said her first few months in Rock Hill have been “interesting.”
“So far, my whole experience has been about adapting and just learning to roll with things,” Schaefauer told The Herald. “And I think sports definitely teach you that, but especially sports on top of the weird times that we’re in right now.”
Fall athletes have ‘full year off’
Negatively, though, there are worries that come with the postponement of sports — including but not limited to the wear and tear a spring season followed by a fall season can have on college athletes’ bodies.
“The biggest anxiety is that if and should we have a spring season, and we play: Will we play again in the fall?” Rey said. “And I’m not saying ‘in the fall,’ like we’re not going to play sports again. But since we are so used to routines and cycles, what is the spring season going to look like? Are seniors not going to get the experience that they should and deserve and hope for, as well as the rest of the team in the spring?
“And can our team, and the student-athletes themselves — theoretically with a full year off now — can they endure the mental and physical load on their bodies to have two seasons in one year? My biggest concern throughout this whole thing is the health and safety of our student-athletes, and not just in a COVID type of way, but just in a physical strength and condition type of way.”
Rey said he imagines his players are disappointed but also ready to be productive in the next few months.
“It’s difficult to not be having a fall season,” Rey said. “It’s difficult for our seniors, especially because we don’t know what’s going to happen for them: Are they going to want to redshirt a year? Are we going to play in the spring? You know, these are questions.
“But at least, for now, we have some clarity.”
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