As winter sports are approaching, team captains are finding ways to hold practices while keeping their teams safe. According to senior gymnastics captain Maddie Olson, captains are maintaining strong communication and keeping the team as involved as possible.

“I’m trying to do my best to keep everybody updated on what is going on with the season,” Olson said. “I want to involve everybody this year in the brainstorming for captains practices and for practices in general because now more than ever, it is really important to feel like everybody has a say.”

While some details are up in the air on how safety precautions will be taken for the season, junior Nordic captain Danny Shope said that efforts will be taken to make sure that the team will be staying safe.

“We’ll have safety precautions, like people driving separately to races if they can and if not, there’ll be masks,” Shope said. “You can’t really get close to someone else while you’re skiing, so that’s not really a problem.”

Sophomore Nordic skier Rachel Katzovitz said there are additional precautions being taken at each individual practice.

“When you show up you have to wear a mask, and they take your temperature and ask you some questions about whether you’ve been in contact with anyone that has COVID, and then we split up into two groups,” Katzovitz said.

Being a captain during the COVID-19 pandemic has its challenges, but Olson said that through the uncertainty, it’s important to look on the bright side.

“We’re kind of thrown for a loop and have to navigate for ourselves. If we have an optimistic and grateful mindset about what we’re given, it just makes the season more fun and a lot more bearable,” Olson said.

According to Shope, a lot of people have been showing up to practices, despite the absence of practices in the past few months.

“We try to get as many people to captain’s practices as possible,

and we’ve got a really good turnout so far. Normally we have captain’s practices over the summer, but with COVID we weren’t able to do that. So a lot of people have missed the captain’s practices and just being a part of the team,” Shope said.

Team captains have many responsibilities without a global pandemic to juggle, but Katzovitz said that throughout everything, the captains are doing a great job maintaining team spirit and keeping things rolling.

“Every year the captains are really good, but just with making it happen this year, they did a really good job,” said Katzovitz. “It’s good because it gets everyone excited for the season and gets everyone working towards it.”