The most memorable moment from my freshman year that I can recall, and hope I remember forever, is getting COVID-19 from my teammate. Getting COVID-19 itself was not the most memorable thing, but the aftermath and consequences of contracting the disease is extremely hard to forget.

When I first got to Penn State, the athletics department and my coaches were preaching the importance of following all of the guidelines and procedures to slow the spread until there was a vaccine and we could make it into more of a “safe zone.” I recall the coaches asking the gymnastics team to not visit any of the other members on the team unless they lived with you. This meant that I, as someone living in the dorms, was supposed to stay away from all of the other freshman except my roommate. As a freshman class, we decided that we would take the risk to see each other every once in a while, but to limit it to outside while socially distancing or wearing a mask if we were gathering inside. Imagine coming to a new place with thousands of new faces and personalities, seven of whom are supposed to be the people you are closest with for the entirety of your four years, and you are told that if you see more than one of those people you are breaking the rules and aren’t invested in the team. This made a lot of us very frustrated because we had no one to guide us in this special situation. Nobody in history had ever had to deal with something of this sort.

Moving into the next few weeks of school, one of my teammates (a freshman nonetheless) showed up positive on one of our mandatory team COVID tests. I remember thinking to myself that I would be okay because I had been limiting my exposure to my teammates and had only seen him for about twenty minutes recently. Additionally, we both had a mask on the whole time during our little encounter. Unfortunately, this teammate that was positive for COVID had to report all close contacts (interactions lasting 10 minutes or more) in the last 2 weeks or so, whether they happened with or without a mask on. This caused him to report the other 7 freshmen as close contacts. After this, over the next couple of days, the school’s contact tracing staff called all of us to inform us that we had to move into Eastview Terrace to quarantine. I had no idea that living in Eastview Terrace for the next two weeks was going to be the worst thing that happened to me my freshman year at Penn State.

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I lived in a room similar to this, without being able to leave for 2 weeks.

The day I moved into the quarantine dorms, small, single-person apartments, I was instantly let down by what I saw. When I walked in, the room smelled musty and the bedding looked less than sanitary. It contained two top sheets and a strange, scratchy woven blanket that had hair on it. The rest of the room was not so bad. The bathroom was clean, the fridge worked, there was a large desk for me to set my things on, and the air conditioner worked. At first, I was excited to have an a/c, something I did not have in my unrenovated dorm. However, with the gross blanket I was given, I slept under one of the top sheets my first night, and barely slept because it was so cold and I could not turn off the air-conditioner. The next day, the athletic trainer (AT) for the gymnastics team was nice enough to grab my mattress topper and fleece blanket from my dorm room and deliver it to me. My parents were also kind and let me purchase a second pillow and another blanket on Amazon to try to make my next 13 days more comfortable. Finally having my bedding situation figured out, I began to receive the food that was delivered to all students.

The food was less than mediocre and there was no other option to get food other than ordering food online or having someone bring me food. This incurred an additional cost to the $20 a day that I was being charged for bland, half-frozen food that I would barely eat because it was so gross. About a week in, I was eating only the packaged pretzels, nuts, cereal, and cookies and brownies that I got throughout the day. Then, suddenly, I woke up and I couldn’t smell or taste my coffee that I made with my personal coffee pot, which I brought with me. I knew instantly that I had also contracted COVID-19. This made eating almost impossible because not being able to taste reduced my motivation to eat to almost nothing. By testing positive, the team doctor advised that it would be best if I spent an extra two days in the quarantine dorms, isolated all by myself. Being alone without the ability to have any human interaction for two whole weeks was probably the worst part of the whole process.

Finishing my time locked away by myself, I was finally able to leave with the rest of my teammates who had all been sent away. I will never forget the feeling of the sun on my skin and the happiness that seeing, hugging, and interacting with my teammates brought me. We had gone through hell and back together, which brought us much closer together than I thought was possible, no matter the circumstance.