COVID-19 Took Away
My Senior Season
By: Lauren Del Vacchio
Editors’ note: Lauren Del Vacchio is a web design and development major and an outfielder on the Simmons University softball team.
Softball has been a part of my life since I was nine years old. In the last 13 years, I devoted myself to this sport as it became one of my top priorities. I spent hours at the gym to get stronger for the season. I’ve had to wake up at 6 a.m. for team conditioning. I’ve suffered through long car rides to get to a tournament that was hours away. I was committed to my sport and I loved it. For my career to get cut short due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it feels like a bad dream that I can’t wake up from.
It’ll be forever ingrained into my brain — the day our coach told us our season was canceled. We were in Orlando, playing the first 10 games of what should have been a 40+ game season. The entire team was devastated, tears were shed, and we all kept hugging each other afraid to let go. Seniors were crushed. Our senior season started five days ago and now it was coming to an abrupt halt. This was not how we pictured our last season to end. But we all had to toughen up because the next day we had two more games to play and we knew we had to leave it all out on the field.
That next day, we played the best two games any of us had ever played. We gave it our all, down to the last inning. Molly Hennessey, a senior starting centerfielder coming back from an ACL injury that caused her to lose her junior year, played her heart out. On the last at bat of her career, she completed the milestone of attaining her 100th hit. Alex Soqui, our senior pitcher, mustered everything she had and pitched a winning game against Montclair State College. And me…well I stood in right field and took it all in. That perfect feel of catching a pop fly into the pocket of my glove, the crunch of the dirt under my cleats as I ran the bases, and that wondrous feeling of hitting the ball on the sweet spot of my bat. All these sensations that I took for granted.
My favorite memory of that day was losing my voice in the dugout because I was cheering too hard for my teammates. We were down five runs and came back to win it in extra innings, and I’ll never forget running out of the dugout to hug Dan Carson as she crossed the plate on a sacrifice fly hit by Alex Morang to secure the last win of our softball career.
While COVID-19 took away my last softball season, it didn’t take away the passion I feel for softball and it’ll never take away the love I have for my teammates.
Made by the 2020 senior communication students at Simmons University