It has been a little over one month since St. Lawrence students left campus. It is safe to say that life right now is just weird.

I could use this opportunity to talk over everything that has changed. I could talk about the premature cancellation of late-season ski races like NCAAs and Junior National Championships or mourn for the cancellation of the Quebec and Minneapolis World Cup races. I could talk about how tired I've grown of training without my teammates by my side or how I miss eating with friends at Dana. I could even talk about how I miss joking with classmates before class, which just isn't the same over Zoom.

However, I'd rather take this opportunity to talk about a few things that this COVID-19 pandemic can teach us.

The 1980s hair band Cinderella became famous for their ballad, "Don't Know What You Got 'Till It's Gone." After a few weeks of social distancing, the song really hits home. As I spend more time away from St. Lawrence, I begin to appreciate everything about SLU more and more. I realize how much I appreciate living with close friends and being around my teammates every day. I realize how much I appreciate getting to know my classmates and professors, and how much I love seeing the familiar faces around campus. I realize how much I appreciate the tight-knit community of St. Lawrence and how much that community means to me. Throughout this pandemic, we can learn to deeply appreciate some of the things we usually take for granted.

For Nordic skiers, spring is a chance to physically relax and offer the body some time to recover. At the same time, spring is also an opportunity to reflect on the past season and set goals for the future. Being home with not much else to do, there is ample time to reflect and set meaningful goals for next season. Social distancing can teach us the importance of focused reflection, both in regard to sport and life because it allows us to focus our time on what matters most to us.

What warms my heart is that despite being socially distant from others, we don't go through any of our struggles alone. None of us are alone in missing the comforts of the SLU campus; any text message with a peer or zoom call with a professor will confirm that statement. As a Nordic ski team we meet almost weekly over Zoom to discuss the uncertain future and to just catch up. Each athlete on our team has individual meetings with our coaches over Zoom to plan for the upcoming season and set meaningful goals. We also have a team Strava group to see each other's workouts online and offer "kudos" to each other in place of the post-workout fist bump. This entire experience of being socially isolated has ironically taught us how socially connected we really are.

The most important lesson I have learned through social distancing came shortly after coming home from campus, when the St. Lawrence Nordic ski team hosted an online watch party for Frozen 2. While I wished we were gathering in an empty classroom instead of inside each other's computers, I still smiled and laughed as 15 college students spent over an hour troubleshooting to get the watch party app running. As we watched, live commenting on the movie's oddities over our group Facebook messenger, Disney's Anna began singing Some Things Never Change, a song about how the future is scary but that we can manage because we have each other.
    
At that moment, I realized that Anna couldn't be more correct. The future can be scary, especially now, but despite everything that the COVID-19 pandemic has done to change our world, some things never change. Even if we must stay physically distant, teammates will still support each other through tough times. A simple movie night with friends (even online) will always brighten your day, a good workout (even at home) can always cleanse the soul, and while campus lays mostly dormant, Dana Dining Hall will always be waiting to satisfy your post-practice hunger. Despite being scattered across the globe, Laurentians will always be there to support each other. 

While this COVID-19 pandemic makes life really weird, I hope we can take time to learn from this experience and remember that although we live in a constantly changing world, there are still some things that never change.

Charlie Reinhardt '23 is a first-year on the Nordic skiing 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.