WA student-athlete worried about future, says high school days ‘wasting away’

Recently, a sophomore student at Glacier Peak High School in Snohomish, Wash., sent an email to his school district superintendent asking for school sports to restart. His email begins: “Sports is everything to me. It helps me make new friends and develop bonds that last a lifetime. It also takes me away from the stress of school, especially online. Instead of thinking when my next assignment is due, I’m thinking of the next play.”

The student’s name is River, and he joined the Dori Monson Show to discuss the letter and his dreams of playing college football.

“I’ve always wanted to go to college football, that’s my main goal, and that’s what I set out to do. So it’s like really hard to get there when you don’t have a season, and this is one of the most important seasons for me. So it’s a pretty big deal,” he said.

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River said in the letter that student-athletes are not even able to practice, and he finds himself looking at his phone for hours on end with nowhere to go and nothing to do. He says it’s not just affecting his day-to-day life, but his future as well.

“Every day it kind of feels the same,” he said. “You do your school, and then you go on your phone, and it just feels like they’re wasting your high school days away. All the parents say it goes so fast and you need to enjoy it. But like, we’re just wasting away and we can’t go do anything or make friends in sports. It feels weird that we’re just sitting on our phones. It feels like we should be going out there and doing something.”

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Has River seen signs of despair among his classmates and friends?

“I know it’s hard. Everybody’s down a lot, and not feeling like how they usually would if we’re like out there doing stuff,” he said. “Everybody wants to go hang out with friends and go to the bowling alley, go do stuff. But we’re just stuck inside. So it makes everybody down, and all our spirits are down, especially when you can only call people on Facetime and stuff. It kind of sucks.”

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.