Playing Sports during a Pandemic

Teams everywhere faced similar Covid challenges when starting off their 2020 season. Here is a recap of what happened at Woodstock and how it affected students.

It’s August of 2020 and preseason has started for soccer players and many other teams. It’s the first year that they will be starting with Covid-19. The girls varsity soccer team began with no masks but they had to social distance. Later, it got changed to masks with normal drills and no social distancing.

The mask mandate didn’t only affect one team, it applied to almost everyone. Football, soccer, basketball, and field hockey all had to wear their masks while on the field.

Mountain biking teams skipped the masks. Instead of wearing them, they started off their races in groups of five. They also had no out of state races.

Most other teams limited their opponents to Vermont teams and the football team played teams out of division but within the state. The middle school girls soccer team didn’t play any games at all. Girls varsity soccer only had eight games in their 2020 season. The small number of teams that they got to play also limited their games. Hannah Watson, a freshman at the time on the varsity team said, “The point of practices is to fix what’s going wrong in games but there were no games to play.”

The girls soccer team also didn’t have the introduction of players at the beginning and none of the teams could shake hands with the other team after the game.

On the football team, things also changed; it was more like flag football than tackle. “It didn’t feel like real football,” Brooks Ruderman said. He added that the team was less physically active because, “It felt like we had a year off.”

Cross country teams didn’t have their typical food and drinks table and the mountain biking team couldn’t carpool, which was a challenge when travelling to races.

Things have changed for the better this year; teams have taken off the masks and started off their season to the new “normal”. “90% back to normal, how it was two years ago,” says Brexton Eckler, a member of the mountain bike team.