The Lost Season
It was the second week of March 2020; the D3 indoor national meet had yet to begin, but athletes who qualified had already traveled to Winston-Salem to compete. And then, the NCAA canceled the meet due to concerns from COVID. Colleges began shutting down. Athletes and coaches expected something like a two- or three-week pause, but the extended break turned into a full semester away. Spring of 2020 became the “lost season.”
Pomona-Pitzer doesn’t compete in indoor, but they had competed in three outdoor meets in the spring of 2020. When the pandemic hit, both schools sent their students home. The coaches led a senior recognition ceremony, not knowing if they would return. Instead of one semester off campus, Pomona and Pitzer both elected for a fully distanced year—turning their one lost season into three.
“I remember it like it was yesterday. We were in Myrtle Beach, SC for a meet,” Brennan Straits, a senior on the Lynchburg men’s distance squad, recalled about the beginning of the pandemic. Lynchburg was preparing for their first outdoor meet of the year. On March 13th, 2020, the Lynchburg coaches called all the athletes down to the lobby of the hotel they were staying in for a meeting. The school had pulled the team from competition.
The day after, the distance team ran down the beach together before leaving for Lynchburg. It was the last time Straits ran with the full 2020 men's team. “When I think about my collegiate career, even now as a senior, it’s probably one of the most ingrained moments,” said Straits, of the day school and track shut down.
Straits’ teammate, Shawn Gmurek, was a senior in 2020. Gmurek said he and the other seniors used their indoor season to further the team at conference and were looking forward to using the outdoor season as a personal proving ground. “We sacrificed some meets to train for outdoor, so to have those sacrifices for naught was very sad,” he said.
Gmurek felt restless ending his career at Lynchburg with the pandemic. “I wanted to go back to the track; I wanted to race,” he said. “As the season got canceled, it was just a mental battle to love running again.” Gmurek decided to watch his alma mater at the 2021 ODAC Outdoor Conference Championship where he watched Sam Llaneza, a sophomore at that time, capture the 800m conference title. During that race, Gmurek felt a moment of clarity, “As I’m streaking corner to corner watching him race, I was having my final race in that moment through his eyes. That vicarious moment is what put me at peace and let me move on.” After the race, Gmurek cooled down with Llaneza and told him, “You showed me what I did here was all worth it.”
To Llaneza, Gmurek was a mentor he looked up to. During the summer and fall of 2020, he used the down time to train. It was a way to pay back the seniors who had cultivated a positive team culture and dedication to running. Llaneza said, “Seeing them [the seniors] just get their season taken away, it was really sad. It kind of made me want to work harder, for them, just to show them all the work they put in isn’t going to waste.”
Like many other college teams, some of the Lynchburg distance team headed out west for the summer of 2020 where they found a short-term lease in Flagstaff and trained together. Straits said of that summer, “It was runners’ heaven. It was like out of a story book.” When they found out their cross country season was canceled, they adjusted to running high-mileage weeks and treating their extended break from competition as base training.
When indoor season came, there was no national meet. Unlike D1 schools, D3 programs were not afforded the opportunity to run a full indoor season or have a national cross country meet in the spring. Lynchburg ran three indoor meets, with no spectators, against local competition. Pomona-Pitzer was still off campus, and when the outdoor season arrived there were masking protocols and spectator limitations.
In the spring, with Pomona-Pitzer operating entirely online, the team missed out on training together, competing in any capacity, and the chance to qualify for nationals. Head women’s track and field coach Kirk Reynolds said, “We were a bit envious … we talked about how that was, not unfair, but hard to know that other schools were doing something we weren’t allowed to do.”
While schools struggled to compete, Sara Anderson, a junior thrower on the women’s Pomona-Pitzer team, struggled to train. Competing as a thrower means training looks a lot different. Anderson had packed her shoes and discs when she was sent home, but local tracks were closed to the public. She couldn’t just lace up her shoes and go for a run like many of her teammates. “For throwers, we have a lot implements. A lot of our training is going to the gym, [which] for the most part was not open … so it was really hard to find a niche to train. Frankly I kind of let that keep me from doing so,” she said.
Anderson motivated herself to start doing yoga and the workouts her trainer gave her that didn’t involve equipment. What kept her going was her love for the team. She said, “The team has become my family away from my family … I think I have this internal drive to do well for them because, you know, you can sit around all day and do nothing, but in the end it can end up affecting your team negatively.” Until June of 2021, she was unable to practice throwing. Before the fall semester of 2021, Anderson decided to come back to campus to make up for the lost year and a half of practice.
Head coach of the men’s track and field program at Pomona-Pitzer, Adrian Gonzalez, started in the fall of 2021. Gonzalez said his main task as a new coach has been preparing the guys to run competitively. He’s been working on reassuring his team they are ready to compete at a high level. “That’s definitely been a challenge because feeling prepared and feeling ready for competition is a huge part of what makes someone competitive,” he said.
Throughout the year, an array of emotions passed through athletes. Reynolds described what he saw: “Fall was kind of a rough, grieving time, there was even some anger at everything in the world. Things weren’t going the way we wanted to. So, we struggled and then got back on track in the spring.” Reynolds and the Pomona-Pitzer coaching staff led zoom meetings for the team to share and check in with each other, wherever they were distance learning and training.
Reynolds has noticed in the past year and a half a disruption in the normal four-year progression of athletes. Over their four years at a program, athletes develop as role models and competitors. “[In the] first year … you’re just trying to figure it out. sophomore year you’re settling in … third and fourth year … you have some big goals you’re after, you're in a routine and also in a position to mentor the underclassmen,” said Reynolds describing the typical progression. All that changed when Pomona- Pitzer was sent online for a year and a half. Sophomores will be competing for the first time ever with their first-year teammates. Anderson was a first year when the pandemic began; she has only competed thrice as a collegiate thrower.
At Lynchburg, Straits, now a senior, feels a duty to take underclassmen under his wing as the seniors before him did. Last year, the team limited social contacts outside of the team. “We’re like a family already, so it was like a time to be around family,” he said. The team became closer. The disruption Reynolds noticed was different for Straits. “We were sophomores and now we kind of wake up and we’re seniors. I’m kind of shocked how fast this went by. It doesn’t feel real. We’re graduating in May. We’re done,” he said. The pandemic has turned a four-year education and opportunity to train into a time warp.
This track season, Pomona-Pitzer will be back in business. The team returned to campus this past week. During the cross country season, the men’s squad won the national team title with six runners becoming All-Americans. Gonzalez said he’s hoping the team will “carry that [success of cross country] forward with track and field.”
Anderson is looking forward to gaining experience in hammer and javelin (neither of which are thrown in high school) and to qualify for the outdoor national meet. Her coach, Reynolds, is working to “reset the team culture and have our junior and seniors, who have missed essentially two years, ramp up at lightning speed.”
Llaneza has big goals after a breakout track season last year. Lynchburg believes it can break the men’s D3 indoor DMR record. Llaneza personally wants to keep the ball rolling in the mile after placing 5th at nationals last year in the 1500m. He also wants to continue the culture guys like Straits and Gmurek have shown him. “Our program is a lot about having fun, buying in, and not seeing running as something we need to do, but something we want to do,” he said.
Gonzalez said his athletes have become attuned to how valuable competition is, and that his team is looking forward to taking full advantage of having a track season. It’s something his athletes and many other D3 athletes won’t take for granted. They’ve become “very mindful of how fragile, but at the same time how valuable, the opportunity of having a season is.”
Regardless of performance or opportunities available, Anderson remarked that, since the pandemic has started, she’s found the real reasons for staying in track. “Track is a little bit more than training and doing well in your events, although that is the goal. It’s being able to have those people to support you and building those relationships,” she said. Anderson’s reasoning is the typical D3 mindset of why we train and compete. Although the pandemic has dashed hopes of competing normally, it hasn’t changed the D3 spirit of love and joy for the sport.