It has now been five years, but I remember exactly where I was when I found out the world was stopping. I was standing in the playground at Banfield Elementary school working as a recess supervisor when I checked my phone and saw that the girls state basketball tournament and all pending high school sporting contests had been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I knew the world was about to change, but I had no idea how much. What followed was nearly two years of fear, confusion, frustration, and just plain old boredom. As a father of two, at first my kids were excited to not have to go to school and they found the idea of distance learning to be a cool way to stay in touch with their teachers and classmates. But soon, the curiosities ran out and it became difficult to keep things fresh when everything was closed and we weren’t allowed to visit our extended family. I remember thinking the one good thing about the shutdown would be that I could watch the NCAA basketball tournament, but that was cancelled as well. It was one of many sports casualties that will never be revived. The great sports shutdown of 2020 happened so fast, it’s easy to forget what things we missed out on. In our area, the Blooming Prairie boys basketball team missed out on a trip to the state tournament, and the Austin boys basketball team missed out on a chance to go to state as they were supposed to play Albert Lea in the section title game on the day of the shutdown. I can’t even begin to describe how defeated and crushed those players looked in Ove Berven Gym when I stopped by to interview former AHS coach Kris Fadness after practice that day. In the fall of 2020, Austin missed out on the boys state soccer tournament and a possible run at the title as the season was called after the section title game, and the Blooming Prairie football team missed out on a state tournament. The Grand Meadow football team likely missed out on state tournament as half of its roster was in quarantine when the Superlarks lost the Section 1 nine man title game. There was also an entire spring season that was cancelled in 2020 where plenty of athletes missed out on their chance to compete. The winter of 2020 brought sports back, but again things were forgotten. Southland and Hayfield played in the Section 1A championship that season with both teams wearing masks in front of a limited crowd. Hayfield went on to win its first of two straight basketball state titles and its baseball team won state in 2021 as well. I can only imagine what was going on inside the heads of youths, but I’ve heard plenty of tough stories from what transpired throughout it all. College students were locked in their dorms like prisoners, high school students missed out on everything that’s memorable about high school, and mental health was a battle for everyone. Some took their own lives and many are still fighting with depression or anxiety due to the effects of the pandemic. The athletes I cover this season were all seventh graders or younger when the pandemic hit and I have seen a difference in them from their pre-pandemic counterparts. Kids seem a little less joyous, a little less social, and probably a little less trusting than they were in the past. It was tough for us adults when the system we believed in was suddenly flipped upside down and everything changed. It was likely much tougher for those who were still learning about the world. Not only were they left questioning what was happening, none of the adults really had answers for them. As the pandemic grows further and further into history, we now have kindergartners who have no memory of the event, and some of those kids who were out at recess in Banfield with me back in 2020 are now varsity athletes. Soon, the pandemic will be in the history books, but I hope we aren’t too hard on the upcoming generation. They had to learn early on that nothing is for certain in this life, and they learned it together, at a very young age.   The post Hulne: Looking back on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared first on Austin Daily Herald. ...read more read less