Soccer during COVID: Coach Ray Bennett
Written by Dave Wasiolek
Everyone’s lives have been impacted by COVID-19 in varying degrees, including our Tennessee soccer community. The excellent efforts of the Nashville Soccer Club team and staff have kept everyone up to speed on the pro team, but many other parts of our soccer family have persevered in anonymity. The Trust wanted to take the opportunity to share their stories with our loyal readers. As such, we are running a series of pieces over the next few weeks covering stories from coaches, supporters, players, and trainers.
The Coach:
In 2019 Coach Ray Bennett’s girls’ soccer team from Central Magnet High School in Murfreesboro lost to Greenville in AA semifinals of the state championship tournament. With almost his entire team returning this year, the prospects were bright for the upcoming season. Then came COVID, and after losing virtually the entire boys’ High School season, Coach Bennett – like every other high school soccer coach – finds himself faced with unprecedented challenges in order to field a High School soccer team this fall.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the start of school and athletics, girls’ high school soccer programs began practices across the state in early July (albeit under strict conditions). The challenge is how to weigh the greater good of the mental and physical health of the students while containing the spread of the virus. At Central Magnet they are attempting to achieve this delicate balance by:
- Taking each player’s temperature before every practice
- Asking a series of questions to help ensure no exposure has occurred
- Designing drills so that appropriate social distancing occurs and there is no physical contact between players.
- Ensuring no player touches shared equipment with their hands
As you can imagine, limitations such as these require considerable flexibility and ingenuity on the part of the coach in order to still make practices meaningful for the development of the players.
For his part, Coach Bennett has been focusing on passing, dribbling, and finishing drills as well as using the time to work on fitness. (The girls just love fitness training in 90+ degree heat.) But the inability to scrimmage and engage in competitive drills has made assessing his team and their needs difficult. However, Coach Bennett is most concerned about the burden the restrictions are placing on the girls’ ability to bond, which is vitally important on a high school team when so many players will be new to the team each season. At Central Magnet this is particularly true, as a record number of 18 freshman girls tried out this year. Despite all the challenges, the girls are excited to be back on the pitch after such a long layoff, and Coach Bennett says there is nothing he would rather be doing than being out on the field working with his girls.
If fans are allowed to attend games this fall and you are in the Murfreesboro area, be sure to come out and catch a Central Magnet match. As you are watching, I know you will appreciate the contest all the more for knowing the obstacles these girls and their coaches went through just to be able to compete once again.
The 2019 Central Magnet HS Girl’s team