Sports
Recruiting Rerouted
Prospective athletes experience hardships during COVID-19
Photos courtesy of Emilio Garcia and Shreya Saxena
THE GOOD OLD DAYS: Emilio Garcia, left, has made a verbal commitment to play NCAA soccer for Columbia University, but he notes that the pandemic may change his plans. For athletes like senior goalkeeper Shreya Saxena, right, the pandemic has complicated the college recruitment process, resulting in canceled showcases and limited in-person college visits.
Raag Venkat Editor-in-Chief
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hy are you interested in being recruited to this school?” the interviewer asks. Senior Shreya Saxena, an aspiring college field hockey recruit, only has a couple minutes to make the perfect argument to convince the coach she is the right fit for the university. Even harder is the fact that the interview is a virtual meeting via the platform Zoom. As the COVID-19 pandemic has raged across the United States in recent months, the collegiate sports recruitment process has drastically changed. Not only has most of the interaction between coaches and aspiring recruits gone virtual, but the opportunities that these athletes were offered in previous years are simply not available due to the circumstances. Nevertheless, many Greenhill students are currently in the process of committing or have committed to an NCAA sports team during the pandemic. “When you go on official visits to a campus as a student-athlete, you spend time with the players, spend time with the coaches and truly envision yourself as an athlete in that space,” Saxena said. “Because of COVID-19, we’re stuck in a situation where we must rely on virtual forms of communication to select where we are going to spend the next chapter of our lives. It’s a blind decision.”
Verbal Commitment Junior Emilio Garcia completed the recruitment process during the pandemic. Currently, Garcia is verbally committed to Columbia University to play on their NCAA Division I soccer team. Garcia started playing soccer at the age of eight because his dad played semiprofessionally for Flamengo in Brazil for four years and professionally with Atlas FC in Mexico for three years. Garcia now plays for the FC Dallas Youth club and competes in tournaments on local, national and even international levels that host many college scouts. “I didn’t really know much about the college recruiting process until I entered high school,” Garcia said. “But once a lot of schools started reaching out, I started to look
into them and realized that it was a great opportunity that I should take advantage of.” With the help of his college counselor, advisors, friends, parents and coaches, Garcia started reaching out to schools and showing them his skills. He then started to get offers from big schools such as the University of Notre Dame, Southern Methodist University and Columbia. He was able to visit some of these schools before the pandemic hit. Garcia has noticed how the pandemic has affected his peers. His soccer league, called the Developmental Academy, was shut down in March with no tournaments or matches taking place for the rest of the season. “COVID-19 poses a huge loss for everyone,” Garcia said. “With big tournaments canceled, where some of the best teams in the nation compete, even some of the top athletes in the nation are struggling to go to college.” Even with his verbal commitment, Garcia said that COVID-19 poses risks to his own recruitment. “Nothing is written or fully official yet in my recruitment process: it’s just verbal,” Garcia said. “I’m only a junior, and with these unprecedented times, anything could happen at this point.”
Disrupted Plans Though some athletes have been able to find success in their recruiting journey during the pandemic, many are still in the process. Among these athletes are Saxena and senior Sheela Vasan, aspiring field hockey commits. They were both introduced to the sport after joining Greenhill’s Middle School field hockey program. Saxena and Vasan also play for clubs outside of school: Saxena for Texas Pride Field Hockey and Vasan for Lone Star Field Hockey. “I started spending more time with my club, which included going to tournaments, and I found this joy that I didn’t have anywhere else,” Saxena said. “Field hockey started affecting me not only on the field, but also in the classroom. It was helping me become a better person, and that’s when I realized that I wanted to proceed through the recruiting process.” According to both Saxena and Vasan, tournaments, clinics and official visits to
schools became an important factor in the recruiting process. Throughout her sophomore year and the beginning of her junior year, Saxena kept in contact with coaches and was able to then play at club tournaments, where these coaches invited her to their respective campuses for student-athlete visits. Saxena had just scheduled her official visits to campuses when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country. “I had to reroute all my plans,” Saxena said. “Not only was I missing official visits, but the recruiting process got increasingly complex because interviews and calls over Zoom were stressful. I felt like I was missing the full experience.” College admissions offices are also relying on her to provide a standardized test score. However, since many standardized tests, including the SAT and ACT, have been canceled due to COVID-19, she does not know where her recruitment stands, Saxena said. Like Saxena, Vasan was also signing up for clinics and preparing to visit schools and coaches when the pandemic hit. “It became really challenging as the school year progressed because a lot of schools I was interested in started contacting me saying that, due to the situation, their admissions [office] wasn’t allowing them to give out offers to any more people this year,” Vasan said. “That’s just heartbreaking to hear for people who have been working toward this goal for years.” The pandemic also made practicing the sport challenging as well, Vasan said. “There was simply an inability to play with other people,” Vasan said. “It’s very hard to get better practicing by yourself. As a defender myself, it’s so hard to improve on my skills without someone to defend against.”
Terminated Tournaments, Postponed Seasons Senior Drewv Desai is also in the process of being recruited. Drewv has been immersed in the sport of fencing for about seven years and currently competes for the Globus Fencing Academy. During his junior year, Desai emailed coaches and fenced in monthly tournaments. As coaches responded, he started meeting
coaches at tournaments and narrowing his prospective college list before the 2020 Summer Nationals tournament. However, after Desai returned from a tournament in March, USA Fencing announced a postponement of the Summer Nationals and eventually its cancelation because of the pandemic. “There is a rating system for fencing student-athletes, and the Summer Nationals tournament is one of the best places to not only raise your rating, but to also get noticed by and talk to coaches from big colleges,” Desai said. Like others, Desai’s visits to campuses were canceled and communication between coaches and athletes went strictly virtual. However, according to Desai, virtual tours or emailing current team captains is not the same as being on a campus in person. Even Greenhill alumni, sports recruits themselves, are feeling the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic on their college seasons. Alumna Sola Omonije ’20 was officially recruited to Davidson College for NCAA Division I volleyball. Her recruitment was relatively simple, but the pandemic has posed limitations on her first volleyball season in college, Omonije said. “I had been physically and mentally preparing to enter the Davidson volleyball community since I verbally committed during the summer after my sophomore year,” Omonije said. “But when COVID-19 started at the end of my senior year, the summer volleyball programs, practices, and trips started getting canceled. I kind of felt my dream slipping away.” As of now, Omonije’s team still has not had a full team practice. Nor does Omonije believe that she will get to be in the gym with her full team for a while. Currently, the team is conducting socially distanced outdoor workouts. Though COVID-19 has created unprecedented times for aspiring college recruits, these student-athletes have come to terms with the situation and are pushing through the process. “Though the pandemic is a disappointment for virtually anyone who is trying to get recruited, we must accept that this is our new reality,” Vasan said. “We’re all dealing with it in our own ways, and we simply must hope for the best.”