Doing It Right Went All Wrong for Brocke, Weathers
Circumstances led to a summer of isolation for a pair of CSU student-athletes
Mike Brohard
You don’t have to do anything wrong. Just ask Lauren Brocke.
You can wear your mask in public. Wash your hands religiously. Avoid large groups of people, restaurants and other troublesome situations. Even still, you may end up having to self-isolate yourself. Or go into quarantine. And then quarantine again.
Wrong place, wrong time, over and over again.
A senior academically on the women’s basketball team, Brocke had been tested twice for COVID-19 through August, each a negative result. However, she still spent 35 days in isolation or quarantine before school started.
You don’t have to do anything wrong. Just ask Naeemah Weathers.
Only 17-years old and excited to start college life, she arrived in Fort Collins early in the summer to stay with an older teammate just to try to get a feel for the Colorado State volleyball program. Before classes began, she had been tested for COVID-19 three times, all with negative results. However, she also spent 35 days in quarantine, all of it in a dorm room.
She never exhibited a symptom.
Now, more than a month later, Brocke is a bit gun shy. The feeling is starting to wane, but she remains vigilant. Her first two weeks of “freedom” she still found herself not venturing out very much at all. Now, she’s visited Old Town and even went to a restaurant, though she will only sit outside.
“I was definitely – and still am – very hesitant and selective in what I do and where I go,” Brocke said. “I literally look at it from every single angle, due to the fact I don’t want to be thrown in a quarantine for 14 days or 10 days. The thought of that I find repulsive.
“With everything I do, I am very selective and I ask a million questions before I go anywhere. Who is going to be there, what kind of social-distancing practices are we going to have? Every question that a life a year ago you didn’t consider is now crossing my mind.”
“I was definitely – and still am – very hesitant and selective in what I do and where I go. I literally look at it from every single angle, due to the fact I don’t want to be thrown in a quarantine for 14 days or 10 days. The thought of that I find repulsive.Lauren Brocke, Women's Basketball Player
Back home in Boise, Idaho, she worked out with a small group of friends in the summer, and all of them were trying to be careful. But one of them tested positive, so she left home for the sake of her family and to self-isolate in Fort Collins. Once that was over, she went to campus to get tested as the basketball team reported, and when one of her teammates came up positive, the entire team went into a 14-day quarantine per the Colorado State Pandemic Preparedness Team following CDC guidelines. She had one day of freedom before one of her roommates, a CSU athlete from another sport, tested positive.
Weathers’ story is similar.
She landed in quarantine the first time because an athlete from another team she had been around tested positive. That was July 6. It was a teammate testing positive that led to the second and third time. In all, half of the volleyball roster has been placed in quarantine at some point.
She never really had a chance to get her college volleyball career up and running. She wasn’t able to make new friends, get to know her new teammates and coaches.
It’s was a nasty cycle for both of them. They are the poster children for the ripple effects of the pandemic, the example of the measure’s Colorado State University is taking to mitigate the spread of the virus.
“We’ve had a few student-athletes with some really challenging circumstances,” said Terry DeZeeuw, CSU’s senior associate athletic director for health and performance. “I think that in itself really illustrates the challenges of us trying manage COVID-19 from both an isolation and quarantine as well as prevention of spread and transmission. These are two individuals basically had an inadvertent close contact exposure through no fault of their own, which resulted in a 14-day quarantine due to public health guidelines.
“It presents a lot of challenges, and you certainly felt for those two young ladies, because they were excited to be here working out as part of the team, and they weren’t able to do that this summer.”
The first time for Brocke, it was her way of doing her part. She didn’t want to take chances, least of all with her team. Colorado State’s athletic department has tested every student-athlete before starting any kind of workouts. If a student-athlete is put into quarantine, they are tested on the back end before being allowed to return.
She spent her self-imposed isolation in her apartment, as well as all of her first quarantine. During the second stint, she had to move to a hotel, as the lease at her apartment ended. She spent a lot of hours on FaceTime with her family and became an expert on the Netflix catalog to pass the time.
In every sense, her life was up Schitt’s Creek for a good month, so she spent some time getting to know the Rose family. She learned a lot about the high-end reality market through Selling Sunset. She probably qualifies for an interior design degree, too, comparing and contrasting styles of multiple series. She set roots in Tree Hill, N.C., with Nathan and Lucas breaking her heart multiple times.
She’s gone from being completely bored and making up ways to stay active to being completely busy. She is taking on a big academic task, but she knows the alternative.
It’s easy for her to pick which route to take.
“Senior year we’re kicking it off strong with 18 credits. It’s been a heavy load,” Brocke said. “Then practicing and lifting every single day … It’s just been nice to get back in that routine again. I feel with COVID it for so long didn’t feel like there was any type of routine. It’s just been nice to feel like I’m in a routine again, back up and in shape and doing things basically normal again.”
Normal, to a point. Because that now means cautious to the extreme.
Her coach, Ryun Williams, is absolutely sure he wouldn’t have handled the situation with such grace.
“I felt awful for Lauren,” Williams said. “To arrive on campus ready to train and then get shut down 35 days, that’s hard for any athlete. I felt awful that happened to that young lady. But her attitude was so mature and so good during that time. I’m really proud of her for that.
“I told her, I can’t imagine what I’d be like. I’d be a grumpy grizzly bear. That’s the thing about Lauren. First of all, she’s a wonderful teammate and her attitude is always upbeat, always positive. It’s challenged her mental toughness, I’m sure, but she’s prevailed.”
Since returning to practice and class, Brocke has been tested four additional times, all of them negative. Naturally, she has made friends with the nurse who administers the test.
And each time, Brocke gets nervous waiting for the results.
I learned my lesson. I don’t go out after practice. Like people will say they’re going to go get smoothies or go eat, I do not. I spend time with them in the gym. I feel like the few hours is not worth the 14 days.Naeemah Weathers, Volleyball Player
What amplified the feelings of loneliness for Weathers is her upbringing. She is one of six children in the household, a setting normally filled with activity and noise. She is used to being in close quarters with friends and family.
She wanted to be around people. Her younger sister, Thandiwe, helped make her laugh by screening and forwarding the best posts to TikTok. The phone calls from home helped, as did the messages from teammates and coaches she didn’t quite know at the time.
Dorm room is part of the freshman experience, but Weathers was forced into one early and often. During quarantine, she found the benefits of being a college student, such as discounted access to streaming services. She watched Hamilton, and loved it. The Umbrella Academy gets a thumbs up, as does the End Game. She has also become a Marvel Universe expert. Given the choice of one super power was easy.
She wanted to be Dr. Strange -- to be able to alter time and avoid all the people she was around who were infected.
This is how bad it has become for Weathers. She has now been tested seven times, all of them negative. After her first stint in quarantine, she hoped the second test would come back positive. Still to this day she does.
Why? Because quarantine for a positive test is 10 days opposed to 14 for being exposed and waiting to see if symptoms develop.
Four days is a lot when 35 have been wasted.
She spent her first two stints of quarantine in Parmelee Hall, the third in Corbett. Now she lives in Parmelee – thankfully a different room. That would have been too eerie to go back to the same one. She lives alone – just like before – but now it is because of circumstance. She was supposed to have a roommate, but she was a foreign student who decided it wasn’t worth the trip.
The key now for Weathers is she is in her room because she wants to be, not because she is being shielded from others. That time alone taught her there will be times in life where one has to find an inner calm.
“I learned it definitely take patience. Everything seems bleaker when you get frustrated with your circumstances,” she said. “I guess I learned patience is not a virtue I very readily have, especially coming from a big family. I’m used to five kids plus me running around the house. It was weird. It was very weird to feel myself slipping into a limbo, like I can’t wait to get out of here.”
During quarantine, when the phone rang it often was a call coming from volleyball coach Tom Hilbert. It pained him to have one of his freshman being introduced to college in such a way, but it wasn’t anything either one of them could control. He just made sure she felt connected in the only way allowed, that she was part of the team and he cared.
The connection meant a lot to Weathers, and Hilbert doesn’t think people fully understand the toll it took on her, or even Brocke for that matter. What he did find, even before getting her on the court for a full practice, was Weathers will be a good teammate.
“There are a lot of people involved in this decision making, and no one questions what they’re doing,” Hilbert said. “Coaches have to be the one talking to a kid on the phone when they’re 17-years old and they’ve been locked in a dorm room for 21 days and they have to do another 14. It’s difficult. Athletes want to be active. They want to get going on things.
“I think Naeemah and the other athlete, often times they are quarantining without being symptomatic. They are doing this for someone else, not for them. I agree with it, it needs to happen, but I think people have to have an understanding of how difficult it is.”
As Brocke and Weathers found, just being in close contact to an infected person will earn them a call from Jeannine Riess, the public health administrator of CSU’s Environmental Health Services, and her team. They handle all the contact tracing for the university, and all their decisions are made based off the quality of information they obtain from an infected person. The speed of the process stems on how soon they can get in touch with the patient with the positive result. If it takes a day or two, then it delays getting in touch with people who may need to be quarantined.
This is frustrating for all involved, coaches and players alike. They also understand it to be a necessary part of the process, one where Williams can find no fault.
“The concern and the communication by the CSU athletic administration to our squad has been extremely thorough and diligent,” Williams said. “They have communicated the message of safe practices and responsibility consistently and on numerous occasions. No way have short cuts been taken. Absolutely no way.”
Just like Brocke, moving forward has come with some trepidation from Weathers.
“I learned my lesson,” she said. “I don’t go out after practice. Like people will say they’re going to go get smoothies or go eat, I do not. I spend time with them in the gym. I feel like the few hours is not worth the 14 days.”
No, because she already had to make up for lost time. Her first days at practice felt like she was taking two steps back for every three steps her teammates were moving forward. She didn’t know the calls, the drills or even the stretches. There is a cadence to practice, and at the start, she had two left feet.
She had missed time getting to know her teammates. She saw a social-media post during quarantine of the other freshmen, and the reminder brought her to tears. A month later, being able to post pictures of herself with them brought upon a wave of joy.
Finally, she was part of the team. Finally, she felt like a college student. One where her dorm room is starting to feel like home, not a cell.
Where there is a bit of freedom. But ask either Weathers or Brocke and they’ll tell you.
It pays to be careful. Even still, there is no guarantee.