COVID Effects on Student Athletes
COVID has affected many things around the world. Whether it be through someone contracting the virus or the virus shutting down a person’s job. A big one for many people even at my age as a high school senior is sports. Now in a past article written by me about returning sports, it comes different for students who don’t have the whole sports association backing up a return with a lot of money. Student athletes as myself have it harder to enter the sports world.
First of all the hardest part of it all is the inability to continue the sport in these times. Especially basketball and other court sports. This is because of the closure of almost all courts around the city, many parks have removed the hoops on the backboards making it impossible for basketball players to practice and play. For me, it is the closure of gyms that make it impossible for me to continue the sport. Thanks to the increase of COVID cases the city closed the fitness gyms of all kinds to prevent any more cases to rise. Specifically, gyms like jiujitsu gyms and boxing gyms have been closed which is my sports.
Now just because of all the closing of sports centers doesn’t mean the end of your career, what is is the complete miss of a senior or whatever grade season. Within basketball and football has been the rise of NBA recruiters spectating high school ball to get a better edge on the players rising to college, and in rare times recruit high schoolers. Now with the miss of a senior season is a huge impact on a player’s career as it could have been their season or whatever it may be. Similar situations like this would be a case of a player coming in injured and missing a season. That is a fourth of their high school or college seasons. Many cases have come up of future prospect players being left in the dust during injury at any point in their career.
The main reason why this could be an okay situation for student athletes is if you were on a rise in your previous year in sports. As the only thing many recruiters can go off of now is your previous season numbers. This could also be bad as I previously mentioned if you were injured last year and missed your season and now missing this season you have an enormously disadvantaged chance to make an impact in draft.
Something personal to me is my jiujitsu gym may close indefinitely. Which is a big impact on my sports in my high school year. Wrestling will most likely be canceled as I sincerely doubt COVID will be gone by Christmas. My friend who got a free ride to college for sports may lose his sponsorship as well because he is unable to wrestle.
In conclusion, there is not much anyone can do but freeze all opinions for future seasons. Otherwise, there is going to be a loss in all graduates of 2021 and a massive loss in student athletes during this time. Luck to all athletes to not lose hope in their sports.