Passing the time
Ex-UConn star Nurse makes most of longer offseason
Around this time last year, Liberty guard Kia Nurse was winding down her offseason training program to ensure she could head back to New York, ready for another season of basketball. These days, her indefinite offseason looks quite different because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Like other athletes around the world, the former UConn star waits in her Canada home with no word on when her 2020 season will begin.
“I wake up, throw on some sweatpants, go outside and jog or run around the neighborhood,” Nurse, 24, told the New York Daily News. “I do a lift usually in the garage and then for the rest of the day it’s pretty up in the air on what happens.”
The All-Star guard spends her afternoons on social media, doing interviews with various sports networks and media companies and working as an analyst for Canadian sports broadcaster TSN. The rest of her time is spent with her family.
“I’m usually on the phone through the middle of the day, afternoon-ish and then I kinda just read or hangout with my family,” Nurse said. “There’s really not a whole lot going on.
“We’re a pretty typical family,” Nurse said. “Just eat some dinner together, try to figure out life after sports, making sure we have something in place because clearly that can happen at any time.”
On April 3, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced the decision to postpone the start of training camps and the start of the regular season, which was initially scheduled to start May 15. The extra time off the court, however, hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing for the Liberty’s 2018 No. 10 pick.
“I wasn’t really that upset about having to be home for a little bit,” Nurse said. “My schedule’s a little bit different from others in the W because I come from (playing in) Australia and we have short-season anyway.
“I try to take the offseason as a time to get away from basketball in a sense,” Nurse added. “Maybe not always being on the court and understanding there’s more to life than the game.”
Usually, when Nurse gets back from her season with the WNBL’s Canberra Capitals in February, she switches over to covering March Madness with TSN. This year’s NCAA basketball tournament was canceled right before it even started, which was when the changes to her offseason started to unfold.
“There’s a lot of exciting things happening in the one month I was home and that was kind of disappointing to have all that stuff canceled,” Nurse said.
Analyst work aside, her role as one of the more senior members of a newlook Liberty team will be crucial if, or when, its first season at Barclays Center gets underway. Nurse is on the third year of a four-year deal with the Liberty, which picked up six new players in the 2020 WNBA Draft, including Oregon standout Sabrina Ionescu. It also traded the face of its franchise, 14-year veteran
Tina Charles.
Throughout this bizarre offseason, Nurse has kept her cool, taking solace in knowing she’s not the only athlete in this situation. In the four months since coronavirus has grown from epidemic to pandemic, much of what every athlete’s typical day has looked like over several years has changed.
Like other professional athletes, Nurse knows what to do even in this idle time. Aside from her home workouts, due in part to not having easy access to gyms because of social distancing restrictions, she did mention having access to an outdoor court if needed.
“I’m not gonna forget how to shoot just because I haven’t shot in a couple weeks and that’s how I’ve kinda seen it,” Nurse said. “I’ve been doing this for many years now. It’s ingrained in what I do.
“I’ve been maintaining and just understanding that at this point and where we are in the world, there’s no reason to push myself over the edge to the point where I end up hurting my joints or getting hurt because we don’t know when [the season is] coming back.”
Englebert reaffirmed on April 17 that the league intends to have a season, whether that means playing into the NBA’s 2020-21 season or otherwise.
So for now, Nurse continues to maintain and wait on the sidelines as the world figures out its new normal so that sports can get back to business.