Today was the last day of my volunteer coaching gig for the foreseeable future. Ordinarily a twenty week stretch from October to March, we ran for eight weeks from September to October. Our judo classes were simulacra of practice, because we had to forgo the close contact so crucial to our sport. We did falling drills and practiced footwork. I had sensei, who had driven up from New Jersey, throw me a couple of times to illustrate what we were simulating, and our teenaged counselor, a swimmer, exclaimed, "That's what judo is, I thought it was like yoga." We have more bruises...
It's been a strange semester, one in which maintaining social distancing took up almost as much time as instruction. The sense of camaraderie was great, we coaches usually occupy separate rooms, now we shared various areas of a soccer field. We joked about how bad the year has been, how tough it is to tell six year olds not to hug. We took 2020 group photos, a bunch of masked desperados, perhaps low-key comic book heroes.
It was a valiant effort, starting with our directors, who cobbled together an outdoor program, salvaging a semester. Our foe, though, is implacable- the pandemic is spiking, we cannot continue in indoor spaces, with inadequate disinfecting protocols. From a moral and a practical standpoint, we had to stop.
We had a bittersweet finish to the morning's activity, bidding each other farewells for an indeterminate period of time. I thanked the kids, and told them how proud I was of them. We had to get creative, and our students rose to the challenge. When the world returns to sanity, we will have the crazy stories of almost-practices, of masked group photos, of our small pushback against a crisis none of us could have predicted.
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