Phillips Andover is one of the first high schools to cancel spring sports due to COVID-19
"That lack of closure is definitely there."
Peter Ling isn’t supposed to be in Los Angeles right now.
The Phillips Academy senior should have just returned to Andover with his baseball team, after their spring break training trip to Florida, and on Monday they should have had an exhibition game with Andover High School. Saturday they would have played Bridgton Academy.
But due to the spread of COVID-19, the spring break trip was canceled. Students were instructed to return to campus a week later than originally scheduled, on March 30, then told not to return at all. The school would transition to remote learning for the remainder of the spring term.
So Ling is at home in Los Angeles. The boys of Big Blue baseball are scattered across the country, and they won’t be returning to Andover any time soon.
“I saw something like this coming, but I kind of always held on to hope and didn’t believe it until it actually happened,” Ling said. “It really still hasn’t kicked in for me. But it’s hard.”
Baseball people, take two seconds out of your day and retweet Peter Ling ‘20, whose senior season just evaporated. No one played harder. No one did it better. #rock2rail pic.twitter.com/fetsaDL3LE
— Phillips Academy Andover Baseball (@real_PAbaseball) April 1, 2020
Phillips Andover isn’t the first school to shutter the season as its students scattered – Phillips Exeter, in New Hampshire, also will be transitioning to remote learning for the rest of the year, effectively canceling spring athletics. Loomis Chaffee and Pomfret, in Connecticut, did the same.
When head coach Kevin Graber got the news, his first action was to pen an emotional email to his players and their families, acknowledging the unique situation while recognizing the squad’s graduating players – post-graduate players Tyler Cox (Los Angeles) and Griffin Green (Chelmsford, Mass.) and seniors Ling and Lucas Stowe (Sutton, Mass.), who are rare four-year varsity players.
“This is uncharted territory that brings with it no road map,” Graber wrote.
The Big Blue had a remarkably talented roster for the 2020 season, packing four Rawlings/Perfect Game Preseason All-America selections alongside seven other players who were named to the regional preseason team. Players said this team could have rivaled their 2018 Central New England Prep School Baseball League championship squad, and after falling short last season, they were ready for it.
Members of the Big Blue roster were confident this team could have lived up to the expectations, maybe even surpassed them, and they’re disappointed they won’t get the opportunity to show it. But regardless of the on-field product, Graber’s seniors are mourning the loss of tradition.
As the season draws to a close, a highlight in the schedule is the annual rivalry game with Phillips Exeter. There are no bragging rights to be had this year.
At the last practice of the season, graduating players take part in “Senior Swing.” Graber pitches, and each senior gets a chance to take one more swing. There will be no line of teammates to greet them after, and no photos to remember the moment they’ve watched those before them experience in years past.
There are no more players doing homework at the Graber family’s kitchen table, no more team meals cooked by Graber’s wife Tina, no more photos taken by his daughter Kelly.
“Not even talking about baseball, I have friends from all over the country that go to this school, even across the world, that I probably will never see again,” said Stowe, whose jersey is still in his bedroom in Sutton, where it was supposed to be packed for that spring break trip.
“It’s really tough. The senior prom, or our commencement ceremony, those are two events that the Class of 2020 is not going to be able to participate in.”
Baseball people, wanna see what it means to PLAY HARD? I mean really PLAY HARD. Two two minutes and retweet Lucas Stowe ‘20, whose senior season just evaporated. pic.twitter.com/TfSpwLIMpd
— Phillips Academy Andover Baseball (@real_PAbaseball) April 2, 2020
Stowe will play next year at Trinity College. Cox is headed to Dartmouth, and Green will continue his career at Virginia Tech. But Ling decided to withdraw from the formal recruiting process in the fall, after deciding with family and friends that he wouldn’t be able to prioritize everything he wanted in a school if he played baseball.
Suddenly, his final go in the sport that he had played since he was three years old evaporated in front of him.
“I made that conscious decision, and it was always with the thought that I’d have one more season to enjoy it, one more time with my best friends on the field,” he said. “That lack of closure is definitely there.”
The questions and the heartbreak trickles down, too. An 11-player strong junior class returns next year, some already carrying verbal college commitments. Jack Penney (Wakefield, Mass.) is committed to Notre Dame, and Jonathan Santucci (Leominster, Mass.) will head to Duke. But these commitments aren’t yet binding, and with the NCAA’s recent ruling that spring athletes will be granted another year of eligibility, roster spots and scholarship money could be affected.
Both players remain in regular contact with their respective coaching staffs, but said the news has been in the back of their minds since they heard it.
“I’ve kept in touch with the Notre Dame coaching staff, and [Graber] has been helping me stay on track and know what’s going on with those rules,” Penney said. “I’m not really sure what’s going to happen or how much it might affect me, but it’s something to keep an eye out for.”
Penney, like the rest of the Big Blue roster, is calm, even as everything is constantly changing around him. A grounding philosophy of Phillips Andover baseball is “controlling what you can control” – a sentiment more relevant now than ever.
So Graber is sending out workouts to his players, getting them in shape for summer leagues, while checking on college commitments, helping program alumni who are looking for opportunities to get their own extra year back, and pushing highlights out on social media to keep everyone connected.
“This is something that nobody has any control over,” Stowe said. “We can sit here and we can complain about not going back to Andover and not having a baseball season, but obviously there’s a lot bigger problems in this world right now.”
“You can’t control what the other team is doing,” Ling added. “You can’t control what the umpires are doing. I saw it in that sense. This is something that was inevitable and it’s not fun for anyone, but there’s nothing that we could have done to prevent it.”
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