Masked-Up Athletes
COVID 19 has had a huge impact on athletics this year. Regulations put in place to maintain everyone’s safety have changed what regular sports seasons look like. Beginning with high school student athletes, people have been disappointed with alterations, postponements, and even cancellations of their favorite after school activities. Specifically, Connecticut football has been cancelled completely this year. Seniors have lost their opportunity to play for their high school for the last time; this is usually when these athletes make their mark on the team, being remembered for years to come, but this shot was taken away.
These unprecedented restrictions have not only impacted high school student athletes, but have also altered seasons for individuals who chose to play on club teams. Some of these restrictions include mandatory mask wearing, social distancing, and spectator limitations. Most sports, including gymnastics, require lots of focus and concentration, and wearing a mask during practice and competition can make them much more challenging. Not only does wearing masks create the possibility of covering the eyes and restricting the vision of the athlete, but it makes it much harder to breathe. Sports already require a lot of lung strength and endurance, so adding a cloth over the face further exhausts the athlete’s body.
Even individuals who do not participate in specific sports are being adversely impacted by these safety measures. Lots of people have taken the pandemic as a time to better themselves, and spend lots of time in the gym. Once they finally reopened after an extended period of time, gyms have their own set of extensive precautions in order to keep everyone safe. Workout productiveness may slow down if the individual needs to stop to sanitize the equipment before and after each use. Although COVID restrictions may seem limiting to many people, and especially athletes, the most important thing to do right now is to keep the number of positive cases as low as possible if we want to see some sort of normalcy in the near future.
