Fall sports have the unenviable task of moving their schedules to the spring season. Find out how our local teams feel about that in this week’s feature, presented by Edward Medical Group.
Football, Girls Volleyball, and Boys Soccer are under way but in a drastically different type of season. As COVID-19 cases spiked in the fall, 3 of the 7 fall sports had their schedules moved to the springtime. After months of waiting the spring season is here and the players and coaches are ready to go.
“We had a pretty good indication that they at least try get it in the spring and they came out with that all sports calendar a few months ago and once that was set you know it just really came down to kinda keeping an eye on the numbers and seeing what the governor was going to do and school districts and you know again we’ve been lucky to have the sacrifices of so many people in our community to put us into a position to play a game”
Waubonsie Valley begins their spring season with a new coach at the helm in Tom Baumgartner. While the new coach had to wait a little longer than anticipated to hit the field he was still hopeful his players would get an opportunity to compete.
“It comes down to you know just kinda adjusting being flexible and being ready to adjust on the fly you know in a day to day basis and really at the same time we really want to come back to what were trying to get down and not change too far from that just being flexible as far as how we get there right now”
After capturing its 4th State title Benet Academy was also in that boat of waiting till spring. The difficult part? Not only will they compete on the High School team, but will also be suiting up for the club season that takes place in the Spring. With these tasks ahead senior Rachel Muisenga is ready to play no matter what side she is on.
“It’s been fun we’re all trying to figure out how much we can do without over doing it we had a like we got a qualifier this weekend for the past 3 days and now here we are so lot of the girl are tired but you know it’s just wanting to win wanting to play finish our senior seasons so that’s just kinda how we’ve been balancing it”
It may feel weird for the Wings playing in the spring, but practices and competition are still going like a normal season.
“We just do the same things we’ve done in years past but with a shorter time period yeah I guess it’s a little weirder usually were playing in the summertime but yeah I still have that same feeling that’s with my team and everything”
After falling short of a fourth straight State title birth the Naperville North Huskies well they also had to wait over a year for get back in action. With many sports starting right after another ends, senior Josh Kaufman had to finish the basketball season right as the soccer schedulebegan.
“I could definitely tell I was in better shape before the soccer season started because I had basketball before I had to do a lot of recovery work as well due to the short times in between seasons” I just had to really embrace it it’s not often that you get to do that like play sports back to back so I just really the most of it and had as much fin as I could”
As all teams and players adjust to the interesting season everybody is just excited to get back to a somewhat normal routine.
Reporting for Naperville Sports Weekly I’m Patrick Codo.
