Not really a covid story but I'll put it here:
TIERRA AMARILLA, N.M. — The Mesa Vista Lady Trojans had ridden their black-and-gold bus for nearly two hours, past snow-smudged hills and red-rock cliffs, to play their main rivals. Over 32 minutes of basketball, the girls had been outpassed and outrun and outscored by the Escalante Lobos. They lost by 40 points.
“We gotta get out of this funk,” Jesse Boies, a cross-country coach who had only recently become head of varsity girls’ basketball, told the teens gathered in a circle on a gym floor, some still catching their breath behind face masks. “We are good, ladies! This team right here is legit!”
It wasn’t just a pep talk: No one expected the team to do well this year; it hadn’t in years. But the Lady Trojans had roared into the season with seven straight wins. They won a local tournament in December. Now, with a record of 13-5, they were still contenders for the state playoffs.
Unmentioned this early February evening was the tragedy that had placed Boies before them — a covid-19 tsunami that was keeping them in online school, canceled recent games and, most devastating of all, had taken the lives of their beloved coaches just two months before.
Those men, the father-and-son duo of Leonard Torrez Jr., 37, and Leonard Torrez Sr., 58, were not just community fixtures known for their high basketball IQ. They were also the father and grandfather of two Lady Trojans. In mid-January, they died within hours of each other of complications from covid. During the Escalante game, their desk nameplates sat on two empty courtside seats.
Boies, the father of the starting point guard and best friend of head coach Torrez Jr., had not hesitated when Mesa Vista’s athletic director asked him to step in when the Torrezes fell ill. Now the job was permanent, and Boies’s goal was the same as theirs: Take an underdog team to the state tournament in March — maybe all the way.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...irls-basketball-coach/?itid=hp-top-table-main