It has definitely been a crazy time since we got the email announcing that we will be spending a decent amount of time at home after spring break. I feel as though many of us had mixed emotions about the situation; being home for a month sounds great to some, but for me I was bummed out. I have built so many great friendships and relationships at St. Lawrence, the main one being with my team. 

The last few days on campus, a lot of us tried to spend as much time together as we could, from team dinners at Dana to just hanging out at our seniors' townhouse or suites. Additionally, Coach Roiger set up a meeting for us to gain more information about how our training was going to look going forward, as well as say his goodbyes to us if we don't end up returning to campus until next fall.

SLU has had the opportunity to adopt a program called TeamBuilder which is an online workout app where all teammates can share and post their workouts. I really like the app because it motivates us to get stronger for next season, especially if we can login and see that everyone is participating and doing the same thing, as well as keeping us in contact with one another outside of our roaring group chats and social media accounts!

Aside from athletics, I am anxious for remote classrooms. I think that SLU is doing the best they can in the time frame that they were given to ensure that our grades and learning experience remain similar. Being a science major it will be difficult to navigate around labs and hands on learning/teaching, but we will all have to remain positive! 

I hope that the rest of the semester runs smoothly and we can only hope that everything settles down for students to return to campus later this semester. As a student-athlete, it is difficult trying to balance everything and I feel for those students-athletes whose seasons were cut short and taken from them due to the situation.

I think that the women's basketball team and the whole St. Lawrence community will emerge stronger on the other side.  

Olivia Barringer '23 is a first-year on the women's basketball team. This piece is part of a series of stories by student-athletes about how St. Lawrence student-athletes saw their academic and athletic plans change rapidly as the spread of COVID-19 across the nation caused St. Lawrence to make the transition to remote learning instruction after spring break. If you are a St. Lawrence student-athlete interested in participating in this project, please contact Aaron Todd at atodd@stlawu.edu.