Senior and team captain of girls softball Emily Klemm has played the sport with the same group of girls since elementary school. She said she was extremely excited for her senior season, as she would be “closing out the year” with the same girls she started playing the sport with.  

However, due to COVID-19, all spring sport practices and meets are indefinitely canceled, which Klemm said is extremely frustrating. 

Junior Kari Hjelmeset, who has played on the girls varsity lacrosse team since freshman year, also said the team, especially the seniors, were very upset when they found out their season was being cut short. 

Hjelmeset said that the team dynamic has positively shifted this year with more constructive criticism and a more inclusive environment, which has allowed them to improve.  

“There’s just more excitement around our team and around playing lacrosse in general this year. I felt more motivated and more excited for the season,” Hjelmeset said. 

Klemm said the softball team was looking forward to a successful season, as they’ve won League Championships almost every year for the past couple years. 

“We had a lot of potential this year to win again and then probably go far in CCS,” Klemm said, citing their recent game against St. Francis, who she said frequently wins CCS. 

Hjelmeset also said she is worried about the college recruitment process because she needed to get footage from her games to send to prospective college coaches, who initially wanted the film and other academic information by the beginning of the summer. 

Similarly, junior Aoife Hernon is trying to get recruited for track, and was looking to improve her times this year to send to college coaches. 

“If I want to get into good schools that I’m looking at academically, I would need to have better times that I was hoping to get this year, especially because I started club track this year,” Hernon said. “This was supposed to be my best season.”

Hernon said that due to COVID-19, many colleges are looking at only sophomore year times, and as a result, they might relax their recruitment requirements. She added that there may be a summer club track season which would allow her the opportunity to improve. 

Hjelmeset also said she was hoping the colleges she was looking at would push back their deadlines on footage so she could collect more film during her summer club season. 

“It’s hard to stay positive, but I feel like that’s all I can really do. It just still seems unreal that this is all happening,” Hjelmeset said. 

Hernon said she is still trying to train regularly for a potential summer season, but it’s more difficult with the shelter-in-place mandate. 

“It’s very hard to train as well as you would with a coach and also with all the materials that you need, like blocks and hurdles, because you don’t have access to that,” Hernon said. “You don’t have the moral support of being with your team. I feel like a lot of people have kind of given up on track this season.”