With the fairly new Omicron COVID strain spreading quickly, many athletes are worried about the effects that Omicron brings onto their sports, specifically athletes that play indoor sports.

Athletic Director Damian Gonzalez explains the biggest change that all indoor sports have to follow with Omicron was the limit on attendance for each event.

“There’s now a 500 attendee limit on all indoor sports, this number was set to 1000, but it’s now 500 with Omicron,” Gonzalez said.

Senior Brock Bobzien is a wrestler in the 132 pound class, but even with Omicron being spread the wrestling program has not been affected too harshly.

“Omicron didn’t really affect us too much other than it stopped our practices for a few days during winter break. Even with Omicron, the attendance for our meets weren’t really different from normal to be honest,” Bobzien said.

Other athletes like senior Isa White have been affected more.  White plays forward for the varsity girl’s basketball team, which has been affected more by Omicron.

“Because basketball is an indoor sport, the rules are stricter. We’re required to wear masks if we’re not on the court playing. This causes difficulty among us when we’re trying to communicate with coaches and other players,” White said.  

The number of cases on the team increased, and it had cancelled some of the team’s practices.  The cases piled up which caused the program to shut down for a week.

“Practices feel weird because we usually have 10 – 12 players, but we were cut down to half that some days.  The week of January 10, our program was shut down due to several people getting sick, and a few even testing positive. Two games and two practices were cancelled, but we’re planning on resuming play this week,” White said.

Senior David Angulo, a varsity boys basketball guard has been affected in ways similar to White.

“With this new strain being able to spread quicker, it spread pretty fast throughout the program, and even took out a few of our players.  Cases on our team got so bad to the point where a couple of our practices, along with games were cancelled, but even before that our game against Madison was cancelled.,” Angulo said.

Regardless of the sport, many athletes have been affected some way or another due to Covid.