My name is
Olivia Archer and I'm a junior on the Elon women's tennis team.
Coming back to campus was definitely surreal. I feel like a lot of us were honestly just grateful to be back. But I think just again, really developing that chemistry with our teammates was so good. One of our seniors ended up deciding to stay for fifth year, which that was a really exciting prospect. And then we also have two new freshmen. One is from Ireland and one is from Mexico. So that's really exciting. Our team has been impacted in the ways that we meet because of Corona. We're only allowed to have four people in the locker room at a time. Because most of our team is international, though we actually only have four girls on campus. But once our fifth girl actually gets in, we're just going to do like small rotational things.
Group meetings are obviously a little bit different because we can't all be in the same spot. We just do once a week meetings over Zoom to keep in contact with all of our international teammates or the teammates who didn't necessarily feel super comfortable coming back to campus. It's definitely sad that some of our teammates aren't on campus, but because we're in the age of modern technology, it's not that big of a deal. I get a call from one of my teammates almost every day. We all have huge group chats. And even though it is sad that they're not here, I do kind of like that I'm getting some time with the freshmen because it's also nice for them to acclimate into it with everything going on with the pandemic and also, like hard classes, they're both in the science department. That's going to be nicer for them not to be overwhelmed the first couple of times. I think we're still doing a good job of making sure that we're in each other's lives, even if we're not like in the same dorm, just right across the street from another.
Our coaches put a big emphasis on volunteering. And one organization that we've worked with in partnership for a couple of years now going back to my freshman year, at least, is the Boys and Girls Club right in Burlington. And, obviously because of Corona, we couldn't go and interact with the kids. Our coach reached out to one of the SAAC directors and was like, let's find a way to send them videos of tennis skill. Every month or so we had these themes or topics that we go and then we all record ourselves doing a little intro saying our year, our major. And then we do like a little tennis activity of all things that you could do in your home inside of quarantine. I think that's really important to us just because we know that even though when we were in quarantine, we were able to give back even when we were in our houses. It was just honestly a really good feeling.
We hope you're staying healthy and safe. Go Phoenix!
