While we miss games, athletes miss their teammates
Be honest: On your sometimes overwhelming list of concerns right now, where does missing your officemates rate? Sure we would all like to return to some sense of normalcy, but Zoom calls and Slack threads are sufficient temporary substitutes for most of us, right?
Most of us, though, don’t eat two or three meals a day with co-workers. Or work out with them. Or travel with them. Or, um, shower with them.
“There’s really nothing like the locker room,” Washington Capitals forward Tom Wilson said. “Guys that retire, they say that’s the thing they miss the most: just going in and hanging with the guys.”
“It’s a support base that complements your family,” Washington Nationals outfielder Adam Eaton said. “At the end of the day, your family is your family. But the boys at the ballpark are another whole team of support.”
And for months, that support has - poof - just evaporated.
Among the problems across the world right now, athletes missing their teammates as they are scattered about because of the novel coronavirus pandemic ranks fairly low, if at all. But as we have written and read about all manner of athletes in every sport you can think of improvising ways to train while in isolation, the dynamic of the team - and what’s lost when it’s not there - can be overlooked. These players now have a vacuum with which they are wholly unfamiliar. The structure on which they rely is gone. There are ramifications.
“As a hockey player, it’s very rare that you’re entirely by yourself,” said Wilson, who headed home to Toronto in early April after the NHL paused its season March 12. “Even in the offseason, you leave your Capitals team and go home, but you have a team there that supports you in workouts and in preparation for the next season. Now, you go from 100 to zero where you’re spending every day with your brothers, and all of a sudden you’ve got to go home - and stay home.”
For their entire lives, Eaton and Wilson - and so many athletes like them have gained a measure of their identity from the teams on which they played. Eaton was a Kenton Ridge High Cougar and a Miami (Ohio) RedHawk and a Mobile BayBear long before he became a Washington National. Wilson was a Plymouth Whaler and a Hershey Bear before he became a Washington Capital. Their sense of belonging was built not only on wearing the same jerseys and sharing the same practice schedules as their teammates but by being part of a group, a group that wasn’t entirely of their own choosing.
“Your family - your aunts and uncles and cousins - you love them because they’re family,” said Clark Power, a developmental psychologist and professor of education at Notre Dame who has spent four decades researching the effects of being part of teams. “Then you have your friendships, and those are people you kind of choose. But when you get, for the first time in your life, the experience of belonging to a team, that’s different . . . .
“It’s a source of pride. It’s a source of having a purpose. When it’s taken away, it’s not just that you miss your friends on the team. You miss them, yes. But you miss the team.”
And everything that goes with it. That’s wins and losses, bus rides and meals, wind sprints and long talks.
“You’re around the guys so much, you can tell when someone comes in and they’re having a good day or a bad day,” Wilson said. “You get in the sauna and you chat about stuff. You build these bonds. That’s what being a part of a team is all about, and that’s what you miss right now.”
You even miss the minutia. On a day when the Nationals have a 7:05 p.m. game - which can be six days a week - Eaton typically gets to the ballpark between 2 and 2:30 p.m. He eats a quick meal, then heads to the weight room.
“’Zuki’ [catcher Kurt Suzuki]
always beats me in there,” Eaton said. “Max [Scherzer] beats me in there. But those hours are huge. The banter, the playful talk that we have back there, it’s so engaging and just really fun. We’re being productive - stretching, getting ready. But you’re also just being a teammate.”
Now, Wilson and Eaton are just two datapoints in how athletes are dealing with all this. Wilson feels fortunate that he has a backyard, a girlfriend and a new puppy, a black lab mix named Halle he adopted just more than a week before the virus shut down sports. Eaton is relishing the routine he and his wife have developed for their young sons, ages 4 and 2, while at home in Michigan. Wilson has played PGA Tour video games with teammates such as T.J. Oshie and kept connected to other Caps via text, and Eaton said the Nats have regular Zoom calls, “which is a credit to our leadership, because most guys need the camaraderie of the clubhouse.”
Even with ways to adapt, it wouldn’t be unheard of, for them or any of us, to have real mental health concerns given we don’t know when or if life will return to normal. To that end, the Nats have included Mark Campbell, the team’s director of mental conditioning, on group calls as a resource. That’s important. Less than two weeks ago, Eaton said, he endured the tragedy of having a family friend take his own life.
“You don’t think it could happen until it does,” Eaton said. “No one really wants to talk about it, but it definitely is on all our minds to try to stay as positive as possible. With our talks with the team, I’m always thinking about mental stability. ‘Boys, if you need anything, just call. Say something. We’re here.’”
We’re here. Normally, that would be in the locker room or the clubhouse, on the bench or in the dugout, on the ice or on the field.
“To be on a team means, ‘I belong. People have my back,’” Notre Dame’s Power said. “There’s another psychological benefit: Having a purpose. There’s something bigger than you in your life.”
For most of us, there’s something bigger in our life than sports at the moment. For most of us, getting these teams back would represent some sort of return to normalcy, some sort of distraction.
But for the Tom Wilsons and Adam Eatons of the world, the teams aren’t a distraction. They’re an identity. They’re a structure. They’re a way of life. Not having them matters. For these guys, forget the games. That next chat in the sauna or BS session in the weight room - the fabric of being on a team - would be so, so relished.