Stories without an end: Seniors deal with careers cut short
Daniel Hein was in his car, driving from the Mizzou Rec to the Missouri Athletics Training Center, when a wave of emotion snuck up on him. The Missouri senior had known since the night before that, in all likelihood, the NCAA swimming and diving championships would be canceled, but until this point on the afternoon of March 12, he hadn’t let himself think about what that really meant. A few minutes after the news became official, it finally hit Hein that his swimming career had just unceremoniously ended.
“It was like my stomach and my heart flipped,” Hein said. “It was really weird. It was like everything sank down, like it was so heavy, and I was just like, holy crap, I'm gonna cry.”
Hein is one of several winter sports seniors at Missouri who, in all likelihood, saw their times as athletes end not with a win or a loss, but a press release. On the morning of March 12, the SEC announced that it would cancel all winter sports conference championships in response to the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic. The NCAA followed suit by calling off all national championships for winter and spring sports a few hours later. There have since been discussions about granting athletes from those sports an additional year of eligibility, and while that seems a realistic possibility for spring athletes, it feels like a long shot for those playing winter sports.
As a result, Hein and other seniors from the Missouri swimming and diving, men’s basketball, wrestling and gymnastics teams had to stomach missing out on the pinnacle of their seasons. Now, they face the challenge of transitioning out of their athletics careers without the closure that comes from a final game or meet.
“It’s kind of like a closed book leaving a cliff-hanger,” said wrestler Dylan Wisman. “That’s how I feel. It’s like I read a book and there were 300 pages and I read to page 280 and they didn’t finish writing the last 20.”
Each senior has his own story about where he was when he heard the news. Wisman and the wrestling team were in the midst of a cardio workout. Hein had just finished the swimming portion of a practice and was headed to lift weights. His teammate Micah Slaton sat in a doctor’s office awaiting treatment for a slipped rib. Basketball player Reed Nikko was doing schoolwork in the Renaissance hotel in downtown Nashville when a text from Cuonzo Martin alerted the team that the SEC had called off the conference tournament, including Missouri’s game against Texas A&M that was set to tip in just a few hours.
Some, like Hein, had anticipated the news, seeing the writing on the wall after NBA suspended its season on March 11. But none had prepared for his college athletics career to end like this. They described reactions of shock, anger, sadness.
“It was very weird, just to have that, a text message, essentially end it all,” said Nikko.
“Me and a couple of the seniors, we just kind of got out of (the gym),” Wisman said. “... I didn’t want to be there anymore. It probably could have been the last time that I ever practice in the wrestling room, like not knowingly, so that was kind of the one hard thing, ... not knowing that it was the official, this is your last one.”
The swimmers and wrestlers, in particular, struggled with the timing of the cancellations. For both sports, the NCAA championships take on an outsized importance compared to the regular season. Swimmers endure months of brutal training, then rest for one or two meets a year, which present the only real opportunities to record season- or lifetime-best times. For Hein and Slaton, NCAA’s would have been one of those meets.
“That was the pinnacle of this year — the pinnacle of my whole career, basically,” Hein explained. “Training all year, training my whole life, for this last meet. And then that was taken away from me. And I think that's where that emotion just hit me when I was in the car, and I almost started crying.”
Likewise, while Missouri wrestling typically schedules aggressively for its dual meets, the real focus is on the national championships, where Missouri has finished sixth or better five years in a row. Wisman, especially, felt he was rounding into his best form of a season after a car crash hampered him in the fall. He had his sights set on earning All-America honors for the first time in his career.
“People say the only thing that matters is March. And that’s a bad thing to say, but it’s really the epitome of wrestling,” Wisman said. “... They’re not going to remember, ‘oh, he lost to Jack So-and-so 9-2 early in the year. Remember when he got pinned earlier in the year?’ No one’s going to remember those couple matches like that, but if you win a national title, people are going to remember.”
Missing out on those critical competitions has made it even more difficult for winter sports seniors to transition out of competition. From my own experience as a Missouri swimmer, I can attest to the difficulty of suddenly stopping a sport that has dominated your schedule, your decision-making, your social life for years. Not being able to see that end coming, to know when the last practice and the last competition might be, compounds that challenge.
In fact, the swim team still tried to give its athletes that clear conclusion. Coach Andrew Grevers planned to hold an intrasquad meet with no one in the stands in place of the NCAA championships, just to give the swimmers that had qualified a chance to wrap up their seasons and pay off their training, but that idea had to be nixed when the SEC suspended all athletics activities until April 15. Slaton said he might have been more upset when he heard the intrasquad meet wouldn’t happen than the previous day, when he got the news about the NCAA’s.
“If we could have done that meet, I think it would have been awesome and we would have brought the energy,” Slaton said. “It wouldn't have been as sweet, but it still would have been a good way to go out with everyone.”
Not only did winter sports seniors miss out on a proper good-bye with their teams, they’re left with a sense of longing for what could have been. In a way, Wisman said he was looking forward to wrapping up his wrestling career — to being able to enjoy free time on weekends again and not having to stress about making weight. His teammate Grant Leeth, who spent three of his five collegiate seasons prior to this year sidelined by injury, had qualified for NCAA’s and planned to retire afterward. But after the competition was canceled, neither feels ready to move on. Leeth plans to use a medical redshirt and return for a seventh year in 2020-21. Wisman would like to do the same if the NCAA grants seniors another year of eligibility. If not, he might look into MMA fighting, boxing or international wrestling.
“I feel like if I never compete again it will eat at me,” Wisman said.
Like most Americans, Missouri’s athletes are still feeling the effects of the pandemic almost two weeks after the NCAA canceled its championships. Slaton planned to continue swimming until the US Olympic trials, previously scheduled for June 21-28, but since he has nowhere to swim and the Olympics are likely to be postponed a year, those plans are in limbo. Nikko had a job lined up on Missouri’s campus once the basketball season ended. Instead, he’s back home in Minnesota, and with classes moved online for the rest of the semester and commencement ceremonies doubtful to occur, he may never have another obligation in Columbia. (Nikko said he would wait to make a decision about returning for a fifth-year until the NCAA decides if it will grant it.)
“Not only having to end my career like that, but you top it off with now I’ve also taken my last class at Mizzou and knowing that my whole college experience is kind of over, the cumulative effect of it all has been hard,” Nikko said.
Hein said it still hasn’t fully sunk in that he’s swum his last race. It will probably take classes, practices and competitions resuming without him for the realization to take root. But since that moment in the car, he hasn’t really felt angry or upset about the cancellation of the NCAA championships. Hein has found himself thinking more about the memories he made with teammates than the competitions — both those that did and didn’t happen. When he does that, the meet he had been training for all season almost doesn’t feel important.
“Most of the memories you have or any athlete has, they’re not actually during competition,” Hein said. “They’re during practice, they're doing dumb stuff in between practices like living with each other. The trophies, all that, those don't make me happy. None of that ever did. It's like real short satisfaction, and you just take a step back and think about everyone else, and the journey. And that’s helped me.”