Lobos discover life in quarantine isn’t so bad
Players kept busy while stuck in Utah hotel rooms
Quarantine in a Utah hotel room is what you make of it.
That’s the approach members of the University of New Mexico women’s basketball team adopted last week when the COVID-19 pandemic effectively banished them to their rooms.
The Lobos (5-0. 2-0 Mountain West) are back in action this week, practicing at UNLV’s Cox Pavilion for games Friday and Sunday against the Lady Rebels (4-5, 2-2). The return to action comes after spending most of last week in quarantine.
Two members of UNM’s Tier 1 travel party — no players, UNM says
— tested positive for the coronavirus Jan. 4, leading to the postponement of two scheduled games at Utah State. The Lobos, who had already practiced once in Logan, Utah, went into quarantine on a Monday night and did not emerge until Sunday after three consecutive PCR tests came back negative for everyone involved.
So what were six days of hotel isolation like?
“Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as you might think,” junior forward Shaiquel McGruder said in a phone interview. “We had to make things to do: work out, color, draw. The big thing is just keeping a positive mental attitude.”
Lobos coach Mike Bradbury expected the down time to negatively impact his team’s conditioning and devoted two full days of practice this week to recovery.
“We needed to spend some time on conditioning and weights just to get back where we can compete,” Bradbury said. “I will say it went pretty well. We went back to full game prep (Wednesday).”
McGruder said in-room workouts, which admittedly had little to do with basketball, paid dividends.
“Jaedyn (De La Cerda) and I did a lot of YouTube workouts,” she said. “We did ‘Hip Hop Abs,’ some yoga, all kinds of things. One of those hiphop videos was pretty intense, too. No messing around.”
While last week marked their first
quarantine experience, the Lobos have spent plenty of time in hotels this season. New Mexico’s pandemic restrictions have not allowed college teams to practice or play games at home, so UNM’s men’s and women’s basketball teams have been doing both exclusively on the road.
The down time in hotels can be long and tedious. Bradbury at one point this season compared it to incarceration.
But both he and McGruder credited the Lobos for bouncing back from last week’s COVID-19 pause with upbeat attitudes intact.
“I feel really good about it actually,” McGruder said. “Everyone came back to practice with great energy and we all still want to play. I take that as positive sign.”
On-court success undoubtedly has helped. The Lobos lead the nation in scoring offense (95.4 points per game), rank fourth in 3-pointers per game (11.2) and have gotten contributions from up and down the roster.
McGruder has played an important role. A full-time starter for the first time in her UNM career, she is averaging 10.2 points, 6.4 rebounds and leads the team with 13 steals and six blocks.
At 6-feet tall and relatively slight, McGruder frequently has to match up against larger opposing posts. She takes the up and down sides in stride.
“I just tell myself, ‘She may be bigger than me, but I’m quicker,’” McGruder said. “‘I’ll battle inside and if I get a chance, I’ll run right past her. This is my job and I’ve got to do it.’”
McGruder conceded that running has been more challenging than usual after almost a week spent in quarantine.
“It wasn’t like we lost our conditioning,” she said, “but basketball shape is different. It was almost like I had to learn how to run again.
“YouTube didn’t help with that.”
GAMES CANCELED: San Jose State announced Thursday its women’s program would not complete the season due to COVID-19 issues. The Spartans had previously paused basketball activities twice during the pandemic. The Lobos and Spartans were scheduled to play Jan. 21 and Jan. 23 in Phoenix.
The injury-depleted Virginia women also opted out of the remainder of the season, Duke and SMU are two other women’s programs that opted out in December.