A true champion graduates from college

 

Larry, Alana, Lynne celebrate graduation.

What can I say? As you can tell by my earlier posts on the exploits of my daughter Alana’s women’s lacrosse team at Johnson & Wales University --- which won their conference in the regular season and then became the playoff champions --- I’m proud of what my daughter accomplished in college --- on and off the athletic field.
In this column, which was published in the June 2023 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, R.I., this proud papa “kvells” over her accomplishments.
Enjoy!
******
The path to my younger daughter Alana’s college graduation started 21 years ago when she was adopted in China two days before her first birthday, and ended last month in an unusual 21-minute ceremony on a Monday morning in May at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, when she received a bachelor of science degree in culinary nutrition.
The shortened nature of the ceremony for her and other senior athletes was necessitated by their respective teams’ success. That’s because the championship games in their conference --- the Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) --- in which the college competes in lacrosse, my daughter’s sport, as well as baseball and softball, were scheduled for the same weekend as graduation.
As a result, the teams’ seniors were told that if they advanced to their title games, they would be graduating two days later at a smaller ceremony instead of the 2 ½-hour undergraduate ceremony held Saturday, May 6 at the Amica Mutual Pavilion, or AMP, in downtown Providence.
That outcome was just one more twist, albeit a pleasant one, in a college career that was overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic, which upended the final semester of my daughter’s freshman year, and which continued to affect her during her sophomore and junior years.
The Class of 2023 had just returned from spring break, when they were told on Thursday, March 12, 2020, to move out of their dorms and return home. Fortunately for Alana, that meant traveling just several miles up I-95 to her home in North Attleboro, MA, but for many other students it meant scrambling to find transportation to destinations across the country.
As the COVID-19 emergency morphed from what had been initially called a two-week shutdown into a prolonged lockdown with a litany of confusing, and often contradictory, government-imposed restrictions, their college life stopped. There were no sports, in-person activities,  classes and socializing  --- pretty much everything that college life was noted for before COVID-19 turned colleges and universities into lonely, depressing places.
Although my daughter was able to take some of her courses online, her lab was delayed until July and August under an accelerated schedule. That meant being masked up and going five days a week so the lab could be completed before her sophomore year began.
When the students returned to school on a hybrid basis in September 2020, they were subjected to spot COVID-19 tests for months, and faced curbs on their movement until the spring of 2021 when, with the advent of vaccinations, college life slowly began approaching normal.
But make no mistake: the pandemic cut deeply into all aspects of college life. Sports wound up being wiped out for months, and my daughter’s hopes of running cross country were dashed as the college eliminated that and other sports due to pandemic-related spending cuts.
Sports eventually returned, and in her senior year, my daughter accepted an invitation to try out for the women’s lacrosse team. She played soccer throughout high school and in her freshman year of college, but hadn’t played lacrosse since the spring semester of her final year at Tri-County Regional Vocational Technical High School in Franklin, MA.
But her enthusiasm, athleticism and speed caught the attention of the Wildcats’ first-year head coach, and she made the team. Though not a starter, she received considerable playing time at both defensive and offensive positions.
While the team, which was undefeated in its conference, was making a strong run at the playoffs, her teammates and coach made sure that Alana scored at least one goal, and much to her delight, during a game that was well in hand on April 12, her 22^nd birthday, my daughter scored three consecutive goals.
But as satisfying as that was, her greatest joy came from being a part of the team’s success, as it finished the season with the No. 1 seed for the playoffs and then captured the championship on a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon at about the same time that most of the Class of 2023 was graduating a few miles away.
Two days later, she graduated with her four senior teammates and the senior members of the baseball and softball teams.
That was the perfect ending for a class whose future seemed bleak just three years earlier when its college career was rudely interrupted by a global health emergency that only recently ceased to be called a pandemic.
LARRY KESSLER (larrythek65@gmail.com) is a freelance writer based in North Attleboro. He blogs at larrytheklineup.blogspot.com
*******
The link to my June 2023 Jewish Rhode Island graduation column:
jewishrhody.com/stories/despite-covid-19-my-new-graduate-emerged-from-college-as-a-champion,36314?