For Seattle Pacific University student athletes, the holiday season is accompanied by exams and the end of fall sports. This naturally creates a juxtaposed time of celebration for them during a period of stress and pressure.
Some student athletes choose to focus more on their responsibilities to the team, such as junior guard for men’s basketball Jacob Gray, a business finance major.
“We’re still in a good mindset … still focused on our goals that we set, still working as a team together. Nobody’s really separated, we’re all mentally strong and together,” Gray said.
While Gray enjoys the festivities of Halloween, he prefers to give minimal attention to the holiday.
“There’s obviously the weekend before [Halloween] with stuff going on, but that’s like a break and once we get back into the week, we get our minds right back where they need to be,” Gray said.
Other student athletes, such as senior communications major Lauren Forster, a left forward for women’s soccer, see the holidays as a welcome reprieve.
“It’s definitely a nice time to have some holidays involved. Near the end of the season, obviously, we love the sport, love each other, care about winning and everything, but with school and soccer combined, it can get tough at times,” Forster said.
Forster expanded on the stresses of the end of the quarter on top of the end of the season.
“We’re hoping to make it to the [NCAA] tournament. When that time of year comes around, there’s a lot of traveling, a lot of school missed, and on top of that, it’s towards the end of the quarter when a lot of tests come up. Along with that, the games become a lot more high-pressure and high-stress,” Forster said.
Forster also shared a Halloween tradition that keeps the team in high spirits.
“We always do a Halloween practice [where] we have little families within the team of about four or five people from each grade level. We all get together in those little families and dress up [in] a specific costume for each one,” Forster said.
Forster especially values this tradition because of the effect it has on the team’s bonds.
“The Halloween practice is a big contributor to [creating] bonds across different grades and ages because you have to think about costumes in advance and talk about those things, maybe go shopping for them together. It’s pretty fun and brings a lot of joy to the team.”
Junior setter for the women’s volleyball team and nursing major Emily Tulino mentioned how the team takes advantage of the holiday season.
“A lot of us love the holiday season, and we have a lot of fun with it. We have a couple of teammates that are spending Thanksgiving together, so I think everyone’s really excited to get to spend the holidays together,” Tulino said. “It’s something that brings a lot of the girls on our team joy and gets [us] to connect with each other and [it’s] an excuse to have some fun.”
Tulino believes the greatest advantage of the holiday season is the opportunities to nurture their connection with each other.
“If anything, it kind of makes team morale go up,” Tulino said. “[We’re] getting to spend extra time together, getting to do extra fun activities together. It makes our connection on the court and off the court much stronger and allows us to build much bigger and stronger team chemistry for future games and matches and such.”
Head coach Jason Rhine of the women’s volleyball team commented on the importance of family the holiday season instills.
“Holidays are a really big time of celebrations that families celebrate together. When we are able to do something as a team around those holidays, it’s a reminder that we are a little bit of a surrogate family that does a lot of things together and does a lot of life together,” Rhine said.
The responsibilities and stresses of being a student athlete take their toll, but the bits of joy brought by the neighboring holidays make the struggles worthwhile.
“I think we kind of cling onto any little thing that can bring us joy [and] having some holiday cheer is always a good thing during this time of year,” Forster said.
