For fathers like Bendik, MLS Is Back decision tough
Joe Bendik and his family have been through plenty of changes in recent years.
The short list: Three seasons as the starting goalie in Orlando, leading he and his wife, Anne, to buy a house there … only to see him dealt to Columbus in Dec. 2018, then traded to the Philadelphia Union last summer.
The longer list involves living in hotels, house sales and purchases, offseasons with parents, “basically living out of our truck for a preseason,” all while raising their two daughters.
So when the 31-year-old Bendik, like every other MLS player, was faced with the decision to head to Disney World for up to five bubble-ensconced weeks for the MLS is Back Tournament, the Union backup had factors to weigh.
“My wife and I, we joked that this is the vacation that my wife needed,” Bendik said by phone Monday. “She’s been through it all for the last year and a half, two years.”
Before last Friday’s sendoff from Chester, Bendik posed for a photo with Anne and the girls: Addison, who’s about to turn 3, and nearly-two-year-old Oaklyn. It was a fitting juxtaposition of two loves for Bendik: A family he wants to help protect during a global pandemic, and a career that he’s also passionate about.
MLS Is Back has made the choice an either-or scenario. Teams have had to depart their home market, spend at least one week of quarantine at Disney and then play matches, which start Wednesday. The tournament will run through Aug. 11.
Already, 10 positive COVID-19 cases caused FC Dallas to be withdrawn from the tournament Monday. Nashville SC, which is in the Union’s Group A, has five positive and three inconclusive tests, forcing postponement of its first game. Several teams have changed their arrival to the bubble.
So far, it appears as though coronavirus hasn’t been transmitted within the bubble. Cases were likely contracted in home markets and brought in. But that merely makes for an uneasy truce between the virus and the bubble’s inhabitants.
“You walk by and you hear conversations,” manager Jim Curtin said. “There’s concerns for sure from the players. But all we can do is trust that everybody is practicing social distancing, following the protocols the league has in place and at this time, our team has done a good job of following them.”
“I would say some guys are obviously anxious. It is worrisome, seeing their cases,” Union captain Alejandro Bedoya said. “… Obviously there are still some questions that need to be answered or are unknown, but I would say it’s a little worrisome as a player. You think about the physical part of it and the effects the virus can have on your body, but then there’s the mental aspect. How can you train or play with a guy who you think might have it or maybe has just finished shedding it and you don’t know if he’s contagious and can transmit it? It is what it is, but I think the protocols that are put in place now down here have been pretty decent, and I do have to give some credit there.”
The Union were among the first teams to arrive, MLS mandating travel to Orlando no fewer than seven days prior to your first game. The Union stayed in Chester as long as it could, in part due to Florida’s spiking caseload. All of the Union’s tests, Curtin said Tuesday, have come back negative through five rounds of testing.
Bedoya discussed life in the bubble as “eerily quiet”. Bendik felt the atmosphere at the Swan and Dolphin Resort changing as more teams have arrived and hallway rendezvous have become more frequent. Looming over everything is the fear of what coronavirus could do to an athlete: While MLS players are in a low-risk demographic for mortality, COVID-19 has been shown to create lung scarring, an existential threat to the careers of soccer players that require elite aerobic capacities.
A normal road trip or customary preseason, this isn’t.
“It’s not like a normal road trip where you have a roommate and you’re doing meals together,” Bendik said. “It’s different. You’re in a room by yourself, and if you do go into another room, you know you’ve got your mask on, which I guess is going to be a normal thing as we go through this whole process trying to find out everything about COVID.”
Those are the epidemiological challenges. But the personal ones are just as taxing. This week, reigning MVP Carlos Vela announced he wouldn’t participate to stay with his pregnant wife. Players that assented to the tournament knew they’d be leaving families behind for up to five weeks and would face quarantine time on their return home.
“They are concerned and you have to respect that,” said Bedoya, also the Union’s representative to the MLS Players Association. “I was scared coming here. As we all saw, Florida blowing up because Florida’s going to Florida and the cases around here just increasing at a crazy rate. But the bubble is meant to be airtight and once you get a transmission of the virus in the bubble, I think that’s a real, real cause for concern. Hopefully we don’t get to that point.”
MLS has tried to bridge the isolation gap, with team activities like golf outings and player lounges. Being on the field also provides a refuge for players. The MLSPA negotiated certain terms of the tournament with the league, and Bendik is disappointed that those stipulations didn’t include more consideration for child-caring costs with fathers away. Attending to the mental aspect for the team’s new fathers — including Kai Wagner, Jakub Glesnes and Jamiro Monteiro — being away from is something Jim Curtin has discussed at length in recent weeks.
The move from one extreme to the next has been jarring for dads like Bendik. He went from three months of 24/7 family time to a month completely away from them. The two passions have been deemed mutually exclusive by the conditions, freighted by the sizeable unknown risk of the virus.
On the base level — the human level — it’s a challenging divide to handle.
“It’s been a whirlwind for the last two years,” Bendik said. “So for (Anne), she was like, ‘this is unbelievable.’ And for me, I loved it too, because I didn’t really get time to sit at home, relax and spend time with everybody in my family. I thought it was awesome.
“I loved it. I love playing the game, so I missed the part of it, but now we’re going back to playing.”