UNE Men’s Soccer 2021 Season Doomed by COVID
This past semester the University of New England’s Men’s Soccer team experienced the longest losing streak the school has ever seen. Will they be able to bounce back for the 2022 season?
Following the 1-0 win over Maine Maritime at their home opener on Wednesday, September 1st. The Nor’easters were unable to secure any other victories throughout the entire season. With crushing results against Bates (0-6 L), Gordon (0-6 L), Roger Williams (0-5 L) and Endicott (0-6 L) the team should be at an all-time mental low, despite this they are all surprisingly optimistic about the coming year.
Gavin Mason, a sophomore (first year athlete) center midfielder for the Nor’easters shared his thoughts on why the team may have struggled so much throughout the season.
“COVID hurt us a lot. We lost almost all of our established players from years past and so almost no one who had played in a college game before was left,” said Gavin Mason.
Head coach of the UNE Men’s Soccer Team, Peter Ostergaard provided similar reasoning for the rough fall season. “We had an extremely small roster to start out with and COVID effectively got rid of any fifth-year students who could have eased the first-year players into the competition.” Ostergaard has coached UNE MSOC since the summer of 2013 and brought about the second highest win total the program has ever yielded (9-7-2) in 2014. Additionally in the second half of the 2014 season Ostergaard led the team on a seven-game unbeaten streak for the first time in 27 years.
This was true, while team like Gordon Men’s Soccer (15 returning upper classmen), Bowdoin Men’s Soccer (20 returning upper classmen), and Colby College Men’s Soccer (17 returning upper classmen) all had significantly more experience to field heading into the first Division III season following the postponement of the season the year before. The Nor’easters’ roster only had a measly seven returning upper classmen for the 2021 fall season. In addition to the already short list of experienced players, three out of the seven members on the team who had recorded any minutes prior to 2020 suffered season ending injuries. The team that was left to do their jobs was a husk of years past, suffering from a lack of depth.
“Almost every game our starting lineup consisted of three upper classmen with a combined seven starts heading into the season and the rest of the team was filled with kids who had never played anything other than high school or club soccer. It was a shock to the system for a lot of us,” said Gavin Mason.
With the amount of losing the UNE Men’s Soccer team did, it has to take a mental toll on the players. Mason only partly agreed with that sentiment. “Obviously, no one enjoys losing, but because most of us were underclassmen we were just psyched to be getting as many minutes as we were as freshmen and sophomores. At the very least we got a lot of experience to carry into later years. Then we can be the super seniors stomping on other teams.”
Jacob Gould, the University of New Hampshire Men’s Soccer captain and fifth year gave insight into how he coped with the presence of COVID. “The biggest struggle was the mental warfare that it caused, constantly worried about letting the team down, but also losing out on some of the best college experiences that life has to offer.”
With so much stress hanging over players’ heads, it is hard to produce results. John Upton, a senior at UNE and the UNEMSOC captain blames the tightness of restrictions at the school during the pandemic for the poor run of form. “The COVID protocols which were entirely necessary for the general wellbeing of everyone on campus had no care for athletics. I fully support their implementation and am not arguing their necessity, but they kept the team from undergoing any real improvement. Only half the team was allowed to train with one another and due to social distancing guidelines, we were unable to even defend each other naturally.”
As the new year arrives, so do more players. With new talent, experience under the belt of the freshmen and sophomores of this past season, as well as a deregulated COVID climate, hopefully the UNEMSOC can come back better than ever.
Initial ideas
My first story idea would be to cover the UNE Men’s Soccer team’s struggles through this past year. The fall 2021 season was their worst on record, and I hope to dive deep into what may have led to such a poor showing from them. Hopefully I can find interviews with the coaching staff as well as some current and past players to put it all into perspective.
The second idea I have is to look into and investigate how much money COIVD-19 protocols are costing the university. This could include anything from how many less students are attending the school due to a number of reasons related to the protocols or the amount of money spent on making campus COVID safe (ie. single use plates & utensils in the dining hall and shielding elements). Potential interview prospects would include the head of UNE Housing and Dining, students, or the Dean.
Journal 8
My own feature was received relatively well by the class today, despite my own misgivings about the drafted version. As I was reading through the story in class, I discovered that the sentence structures, when vocalized, were choppy. The lengthy sentences resulted in a jarring article that was difficult to read. If the words do not cleanly roll off of the page, the reader will likely drop the article and move on to the next. Going into the final version of my feature story I will make sure to trim some of the longer sentences to promote readability. Additionally, the class brought my introduction of quotes to my attention. I was unsure of how to properly lead into the use of a statement from my sources which meant that I left my word for word, raw interview questions in the final product. Before submitting the final draft, I need to rework the cited information so that it appears naturally throughout the page. In order to properly do this, I will need to explain why this quote is important and why the individuals interviewed have valuable opinions to supplement the passage. Due to the short window of time before submitting the first draft and my review session I only had one source to voice their opinions on the topic at hand. In order to provide the reader with the full story I need to include the ideas of more people. The most important people to gather information from are my head coach, a senior player on the team and potentially a player from another team with a different experience.
Editorial Review
As a relatively inexperienced author, especially in the field of journalism, each editorial session she new light on slight improvements that I could make to bolster my writing techniques. The very first improvements I realized I had to make required no one but myself to discover. When an author is forced to read their piece in front of a live audience, every grammatical error comes with a grimace. As I reached the third paragraph within my feature during the presentation of my feature to the class, I felt beads of sweat start to prickle at my scalp. Anxiety and the fear of embarrassment are extremely helpful emotions when reworking or editing one’s own work. More specific tips that the class echoed for almost every story presented consisted of how to properly incorporate quotes. Different styles of features required alternative introductions for people of similar status. In the more informational or hard news pieces it was very important to provide the reader with a reason to respect the quoted interviewee’s opinions on the issue. Additionally, many of us struggled with repetition of sentence structure and a general lack of variety throughout the publications. Instead of writing “so and so said” every single time a sentence needed to be credited, there are other manners in which the same message can be conveyed. Through a proper introduction and the indication from the author that the same person is still speaking, it is unnecessary for the same attribution to be used after the statement. The last thing, and likely the most important of all is the need to eliminate bias within journalism. Journalists are always going to have a hidden bias but to remove it to give the audience the least skewed perspective of an event, the author should provide every side to the story. The omission of a comment can completely changes the meaning of what the interviewee was intending. Once the writer gains approval from a source to publish a statement, the only thing that can be done to remove further bias is to limit the use of adjectives throughout the story which can reveal one’s perspective.
