The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the University of Massachusetts to cancel all fall sports, but what happens to club athletics?
With the school and the NCAA scrambling to find the best solution for their varsity programs, club sports like the UMass club lacrosse team have been left behind, with no clear plans in place for them.
“There really isn’t anything right now, it’s just based on how the school reacts and how this pandemic goes” said captain Devin Brown.
Brown is one of five captains on the Minutemen club lacrosse team and is living in off-campus housing with a few of his teammates this semester. Mikey Burke, another captain on the team, finds himself at home this semester taking classes remotely.
“He’s already come up a couple times in the past few weeks, so that’s good,” Brown said of Burke.
While it remains unclear if the club team will even manage to put together a season for the spring, they remain in contact with other schools and have been optimistic that schools will allow club sports next semester.
“We’ve been in contact with teams since last year,” said Brown. “But obviously every school is different and with us, everything is closed.”
Getting in any sort of unofficial practice time has also been difficult, since UMass removed all lacrosse nets from the fields on campus. However, the few players that are on campus still find ways to keep their skills sharp if they are allowed to play.
“We’ll probably try to have a couple pickup games,” said Brown. “Nothing serious, kind of just fun stuff during this quarantine.”
The Minutemen do have a rough outline for this year, including making a schedule and hosting tryouts, but they are not setting anything in stone since there is still so much up in the air at the moment.
“If we do have a season, we would hopefully start putting a schedule together by the end of winter break,” Brown said. “We’d probably have a short, three-day tryout in the spring when we come back.”
The lacrosse team typically run their tryouts at the beginning of the fall semester, but that won’t be possible this year, so they had to push tryouts to the spring if they are able to play.
“We usually have a tryout in the first month of school,” Brown said. “And then we just get a couple play-in games before we have an actual season.”
With everything happening in the world right now, it is easy to wonder if some players even want to play should they be allowed to. But for the club lacrosse team this is not even a question.
“A lot of us do really want to play, we have a lot of seniors here especially,” Brown said. “We want to play but we’re just going to wait for the school and see what we can do.”
That bond also extends to the UMass women’s lacrosse team, who have a close relationship with the men’s club team. They even share the field at times.
“We were trying to get a little fun game going between the both of us just to mess around,” Brown said. “We were thinking girls use the boy sticks and boys use the girl sticks, just to have fun.”
As with many other college sports at all levels, the UMass club lacrosse team is just rolling with the punches and staying as prepared as possible for a spring season.
Colin McCarthy can be reached at [email protected] and followed on twitter @colinmccarth_DC.
