Now that we are a month into our spring semester, we can officially begin to look forward to UMass Boston’s spring sports which usually start late February. It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly a full year since COVID-19 took over our university and the entire sports world. So, let’s take a look back at the journey that led us to this point.
The beginning of the spring semester in 2020 was fairly normal. The coronavirus had been acknowledged but never truly acted on in the United States and on campus. Therefore, things for status quo for about the first month back on campus in 2020.
Things began to change a little bit at the end of February as spring sports were beginning to postpone their games due to potential COVID-19 exposures, but mostly precautionary. Little did we know at the time that was the end of the spring sports season. Despite sports being temporarily halted, in-person class hadn’t changed quite yet for about another couple weeks. Then on March 11, we all received an email saying that UMass Boston will be going remote until at least April 3.
In that time between March 11 and April 3, we learned that there was no going back to the normal in-person class format for at least the rest of the spring. Unfortunately, along with that news meant that we wouldn’t be having any sports on campus for a while either. 
It seems like things were only beginning to get worse creeping into the summer. There wasn’t even a sign of professional sports resuming never mind UMass Boston sports. It wasn’t until around June when the PGA tour was cleared to resume play. Then in the coming months the MLB, NHL and NBA would follow suit in finishing their respective seasons. It seemed like since these leagues were able to create some sort of blueprint on how to complete a season while staying relatively safe from the COVID-19 virus then UMass Boston could have been able hold sports in the fall. Unfortunately, that still wasn’t the case here at UMass Boston.
Finally, that brings us to this winter going into the spring semester. UMass Boston had announced that sports will be allowed to resume training on campus in preparation for a potential spring season. This is obviously great news and a big step in returning to a sense of normalcy for our school.
The final step in all this would be to get all of us students back to learning on campus. Fortunately, we already know that that won’t be happening until at the very least next fall as we have recently learned that the summer semester will remain in a remote format. Luckily, with the improvements of the new vaccine and the slowly increasing supply of the vaccine there should not be any reason for UMass Boston not to resume in-person classes come next fall barring any major vaccine setbacks. 
It’s crazy that this whole journey started just about a year ago. For someone like me, the last time I was in a classroom I was a sophomore, now the next time I’ll be in a classroom I’ll be a senior. What we thought was just going to be a three-week quarantine wound up being a yearlong nightmare.