Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Adam Donnelly

Youth Sports & COVID-19

YOUTH SPORTS & COVID-19: What’s next?

Mar 11, 2022 | 4:26 PM

KAMLOOPS — This week (March 8-11), CFJC has explored the impacts of the global pandemic on young athletes in the city. We’ve looked at the impacts on competition, on opportunities for young athletes, and the social toll of the restrictions around competition and gathering.

Tonight, we examine how these impacts could affect athletes and sports as we begin to move past restrictions on our journey towards normalcy.

Greg Kozoris — or simply Koz, as many know him — is in the business of helping athletes prepare their bodies for sport. For the past two years, he’s been doing his best to keep his gym, Acceleration Strength and Condition, open amid the ever-changing landscape of restrictions.

Exercise Physiologist Greg Kozoris – Image Credit: CFJC Today

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“It’s been hard,” Koz tells CFJC Today. “It’s been hard on people, it’s been hard on this place. We’ve survived — we’ve honoured every type of mandate, restriction we’ve had to.”

While restrictions around training and competition have been onerous, Kozoris has seen how those changes affect the young athletes he works with.

“There have been some real challenges on them. The biggest thing for them is they’re young, and not knowing — so, the ambiguity of what they can do, what they can’t do — it’s changed a lot,” Koz explains. “Every three weeks for a while there — then there’s the transfer period, where they go from the last set of rules to the new set of rules, and then back.”

When you see how some adults have reacted to pandemic restrictions, it’s not surprising to hear that over 70 per cent of school-aged children reported a deterioration in their mental health, according to research done by SickKids Hospital in Toronto.

Peter Soberlak trains athletes on the mental side of sports. He says FOMO — the fear of missing out — has become more prevalent during the pandemic.

“I really think that it’s been hard on many athletes and players that are in the prime of their lives, just developing and embarking on potentially a professional career,” Soberlak says. “It’s hard not to look back and think, ‘Man, have I missed out, have I not improved, or grown through this period.’”

TRU Physical Education professor Peter Soberlak – Image Credit: CFJC Today

While this time has been full of uncertainty, Soberlak suggests that those athletes who doubled down on training and continued to work to improve will reap the benefits of their hard work.

“There’s always opportunity in uncertainty and there’s always a way, for a lot of athletes to focus more on training, focus more on mental skills, focus more on developing their body and their physical skills,” Soberlak says.

That theory has been proven. Across Canada, university sport was paused for the first year of the pandemic. Athletes on the TRU Men’s Basketball team spent that year hitting the weights and court, in search of improvement.

“Simon Crossfield is out there, Asher Mayan is right here. Asher played a grand total of 33 minutes his freshman year. He just had 32 [points] against UVic. He got better during that time,” WolfPack head coach Scott Clark says. “Simon had played a grand total of 66 minutes — they’re improved basketball players. They’ve put in the time and we were able to help their skill level.”

That’s been the silver lining — especially for folks on the strength and conditioning side of sports.

“On all of our teams, they got really strong,” Koz says. “They got really strong. We got to really work on the strength index, from the kids to WHL to TRU, and that is very much a positive. We got to focus on teaching them how to train.”

Soberlak sees a path forward for athletes who maintain a positive attitude and continue to look forward.

“There’s always going to be another game, there’s always going to be another chance to compete,” Soberlak says. “Everybody was in the same boat, so that group that misses that one experience — well, everyone did.”

Restrictions in the province continue to ease, which means we’re getting closer to a return to a pre-pandemic world.

However, there’s still a divide in our society that we need to overcome. Greg Kozoris sees sport as a way to bring folks on either side of that divide back together.

“Sport is a wonderful unifier in society,” Koz says. “If you have some patience — and we can still see that even though we’re at full capacity, some people are still tentative and they will be for a while. Moving forward, how do we deal with it? We deal with it through support. If you love sports, support sports.”