Oregon women’s basketball head coach Kelly Graves is steering away from the negatives and focusing on adjusting to the new normal this season.
“We can’t even go out and have a team meal together, and that’s difficult,” Graves said. “That’s a chance to bond and build team chemistry and things like that off the court.”
Graves, his staff and players’ daily routine now consists of COVID-19 testing in the early mornings, then waiting for the results to come back hours later, before heading into practice in the afternoon.
This is their new normal.
“We have focused on mental health and talking about different things everyday and how we can push ourselves through,” he said.
The biggest struggle for Graves: communication.
Graves was not able to see all of his players at one time in-person up until recently. Now that official practices have begun, his team is able to communicate with one another aside from video conferencing.
“Early on everything had to be done through Zoom,” he said. “The personal face-to-face just wasn’t there.”
He praised his staff for the smooth on-boarding process for his players, especially the five incoming freshmen, all coming from different areas of the country: Te-Hina Paopao (Calif.), Kylee Watson (N.J.), Angela Dugalic (Ill.), Maddie Scherr (Ky.), Sydney Parrish (Ind.).
Now that the team can start full out practices and scrimmages, Graves sees his players, especially the new faces on the roster, buying into the process and what they can achieve this year.
With the spread of Coronavirus looming all around them, Graves knows that this can affect his players’ mental health and well-being.
“This year more than ever we have really tried to engage as much as we can with them in smaller groups, maybe watch more film than we normally would, socially distant,” he said. “We’ve done some good team bonding things that we’ve done that I wouldn’t normally do.”
Mediating and journaling are two activities that Graves and his staff have implemented to confront how his players are feeling and ways to handle it.
“We’ve tried to make our practices more fun, to keep that energy coming up because there is so much negative going on right now,” he said. “We want them to enjoy coming to practice, but it’s been a little different than it has in the past.”
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