The day the sports world stopped

On March 11, 2020, the sports world stopped, and COVID-19 started to become significant in our daily lives. 

I was in my childhood bedroom in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania scrolling through Twitter, when I saw the infamous tweet. ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski broke the news that the NBA suspended their season. I was in complete shock. No NBA? 

I didn’t believe it at first. I thought it had to be fake, that someone had hacked into his phone and played a prank on the world.

Just 12 hours later, March Madness was canceled. One by one, leagues started making announcements about the cancellations of their seasons. That’s when everything became real.

Anyone who watches sports knows it does not stop for anything. Sports is 365 days of the year. It doesn’t stop for holidays, tragedies, births or deaths. 

But this global pandemic wasn’t just anything. In the U.S. 526,000 lives were lost in a year and the number continues to rise every single day. 

Just about everybody in the U.S knew what was happening around the world. We saw it on our TVs. We saw what was occurring in China and how they were running out of beds and had to build extra hospitals. We heard the reports that people who were abroad were probably going to have to come home before the borders closed. We talked about it in our classes before we went home for what was meant to be spring break.

I first heard about coronavirus in January and was aware of how bad it was in other countries. I thought, ‘this will never happen to us.’ Little did I know. 

It didn’t become real for me until sports were put on pause. 

After I saw the NBA suspended the season, I had a full-blown panic attack. I was so worried. For the first time in our lives, sports had been put on pause.

The greatest thing about sports is that it allows people to escape from what’s happening in the world. When you’re watching your team in its glorious moments, nothing else seems to matter. 

The cancelation of sports forced people to think about what was actually happening. For the first time in our lives, we didn’t have sports to distract us. 

As someone who wants to work in sports, I am so grateful that we had this time away from actual play. It gave us time to spend with our families, time to make whipped coffee, go on walks, FaceTime friends, watch Tiger King and bake cookies until grocery stores ran out of flour. It gave me a greater appreciation for the world. 

The three months without sports were some of the longest moments of my life. While sports are now happening in their own modified ways, I will never forget when the sports world stopped. It’s something I never thought would happen, and it’s something I never hope to experience again. 

Although I am so happy sports are happening again, I can’t stop but think about all that’s happened in the past year and how many lives were lost to COVID-19. I will never forget the year sports shut down, and everything else that was lost with it.