When Grant Achilles finally returned to the field with his Brown squad this past fall, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
The Bears weren’t alone in that regard as the entire Ivy League is springing into game action for the first time since March of 2020, but the eighth-year head coach had some questions as the team returned to prepare for a full season.
After all, it had surely been a while since his team truly felt like a team, having last been together on March 8, 2020. Their chances to compete for the remainder of 2020 and all of 2021 were taken away by the Ivy League by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even though there was some summer ball mixed in for the majority of our guys, the past 18 months were still a very inward-focused time. To our players’ credit, they developed,” Achilles said. “It was a rough start when they got back. Communicating on a fly ball was just something they hadn’t done. … But, there was a competitive fire every single day.”
