The Texas A&M club basketball team is facing new restrictions on practices and games due to COVID-19.
Junior Club President Brian Wolfe said that there are a lot of changes to the operations of the club, but the members are still happy it can hold practices.
“We can’t play games [because] there is no one to play,” Wolfe said. “The other big thing is our practices are heavily restricted, so we’re not allowed to have contact… It sucks to practice like that, but we’re happy we’re able to practice in the first place.”
While some club sports that are less contact-heavy look to return to competition in the spring, for club basketball, returning to normal practices is the chief goal.
“The track we’re on right now, we’re just trying to get practices back to normal,” Wolfe said. “We want full-contact practices. As far as our games go, [National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association], who is in charge of our games for the spring, sent a bunch of people a survey asking if they would be interested in playing and if they would be allowed to play. Nothing is set in stone.”
Last year, the club basketball team would meet two to three times a week and run scrimmages to work on team play. Now, practices have pivoted to improve players’ individual play.
“Since we can’t scrimmage, we’ve had to do shooting drills, ball-handling, defensive, off-ball stuff,” sophomore treasurer John Shaw said. “We meet Wednesdays now. We have two courts so we’re all spread out, all have masks on, and you’ll stick with your same six people on a court.”
For a culmination of reasons, COVID-19 related or not, the club did not hold tryouts this semester, but will reconsider recruiting in the spring.
“We have 13 returning members, we were only going to take on one new guy anyway,” Wolfe said. “You can’t see anybody play in a scrimmage, and that’s like the deciding factor in recruiting somebody… So we just said, ‘To hell with it, we’ll stick with who we’ve got.’”
A sentiment several of the players share is that the social aspect of the club created camaraderie that makes the team stronger. Senior William Dietlein said the best part of being in the club in the past was the ability to consistently scrimmage with the same people.
“I definitely miss it,” Dietlein said. “I think I speak for all my teammates when I say we are ready to get back at it and run and gun at 100 percent. To us at least, we’ve always felt that’s how you get better. John and Brian hit it right, we just want to hoop but we can’t right now.”