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Sunday March 14th, 2021 8:15am
(Photo Courtesy of UMass Athletics)
UMass opens its season Sunday against Fairfield. The Minutemen are the last men s DI team to get started (outside of the Ivy League) due to several delays to the start of their season due to COVID-19 protocols. Check out the full calendar of games.
It’s tough to think of a program that has as much of a clear-cut identity as UMass.
It was drilled into Jeff Trainor by coach Greg Cannella on his recruiting visit.
“He kept it as real as he could. He told me and my family, ‘This is a hard-working school. This is a blue-collar school,’” Trainor said in an interview in January, before the team went through sporadic stops and starts due to COVID-19 protocols. “Growing up in Billerica, it was the same message we preached. I knew it was going to be the best place for me.”
Not everyone stayed to help. When a crisis happens in America, we run to the rescue. Everybody runs to the rescue, said Will Wallace. But then I had to say to myself, what s the aftermath? Who s going to keep it going?
Wallace, director of youth programs at Emerge Community Development in north Minneapolis, stood in a room crowded with everything his neighbors might need to make it through the week. Cans of soup, bags of onions, stacks of cleaning products and diapers, warm clothes, school supplies.
These were the sort of donations that came flooding in over the summer, piling high at drop-off sites between the shattered grocery stores and burned-out gas stations along Broadway. Volunteers showed up with brooms to sweep broken glass off the sidewalks; people brought gift cards at struggling shops and donated to North Side nonprofits. But public attention shifted to the next crisis of 2020 and the one after that and the one after that.