A few months ago we were in the weight room getting ready for our season to being. A few months ago we were booking our trips for our games/competitions. A few months ago we were prepping for our spring season. A few weeks ago we were bonding with our team that became our family. A few weeks ago we were prepared to have one our best seasons yet. That all ended in the blink of an eye as the COVID-19 took this all from us. In the blink of an eye our season that we worked so hard for was taken from us. The COVID-19 has broken a lot of hearts with so many deaths and sicknesses. It also broke the hearts of millions of seniors, students, teachers, workers, and athletes. Jobs have been lost, graduations have been postponed, proms have been cancelled and seasons have ended before we got to start them. Being a student athlete is something you only get for a short amount of time, especially for college students. For most college students you only get four more years of doing the sport you love everyday. You don’t get any of this back.
I’m currently a college cheerleader and for those who don’t know, we only get one competition a year and that’s NCA college nationals in Daytona Beach Florida which happened every year in April. This year it was cancelled and the MIAA along with many other schools shut down all spring sports including golf, cheerleading, baseball, softball, track, lacrosse and many other sports. For the cheer world, this was very devastating and that because like I said before Nationals is our only competition of the year. We start our season in June and we work out, build bonds with our teammates and go to camp to prepare for the season ahead of us. We then spend all fall fundraising, cheering at football games and getting our Daytona choreographer and we begin practicing our routine. After winter break we are full force with practice. We practice twice a day sometimes at 5am and then again at 8pm because we want to work as hard as we can to become national champions. We spent 10 months working on one routine to show the world and all that hard work and sacrifices were taken from us.
Coming from all spring athletes: yes we know that this crisis is so much bigger than a sport. We know that people are losing things much bigger than a season, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t grieving and it doesn’t mean that this doesn’t hurt. We lost a whole season that we all worked so hard on and a season we were looking forward too. What hurts the most is what if this was the year we were National Champions? Think about the senior athletes that had no idea last year was there last year competing in the sport they love. We understand that this isn’t comparable to the amount of deaths and other things being lost but please understand that we lost a huge part of our years too. We didn’t get to create the bonds, memories or championships that we all deserved. This hurts because all our hard work went unseen and that isn’t fair or right to any athlete. Although this has reminded us of our why and has motivated us so much for next season.