Each year about 180,000 sports scholarships are available from the D1 and D2 schools in the NCAA. So how are all of these scholarships being affected by the coronavirus? Well, every sport, and every school is handling it differently. For example, Loyola University in Chicago, has cancelled all sports for fall 2020. Loyola soccer player Giann Magno says, “Going from playing every single day to not being able to play at all.” He said. “It’s hard to concentrate on certain things, especially school, when I haven’t expended the right amount of energy.”

Magno isn’t the only student athlete that feels this way. Ali Wahab, a wrestler from Old Dominion University, might even consider Magno lucky. Old Dominion decided to cut wrestling completely because it is a very contactful sport. When Wahab found out he will no longer be wrestling with the university due to the coronavirus, he said he is “feeling angry about how they decided to cut wrestling and tries to hold himself back from saying something he shouldn’t every time someone talks about it.” While Old Dominion may have cancelled all wrestling, some sports teams are just pushing back their seasons and are still awarding their scholarships to the athletes. Others are cutting some of their players or are encouraging them to move on.

It is definitely a hard pill to swallow for these scholarship recipients, because school is so different then how they envisioned it. Many of these students have been working for these scholarships for their entire lives, and they feel that they are being stripped of their dreams. They hope all their hard work paid off.