Red Bulls midfielder Sean Davis takes Post readers behind the scenes as he tries to not only stay prepared for the resumption of the 2020 season amid the coronavirus pandemic, but — as captain and player rep — also keep his teammates informed and prepared. As told to Brian Lewis.
For Red Bull fans, first and foremost, I hope everyone’s doing well. I hope everyone is safe, I hope everyone is healthy, and I hope we’ll continue to look out for each other.
Secondly, we miss the fans showing up at Red Bull Arena, we miss their support. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
It’s a complicated time, but thankfully my family, my friends and everyone at the club are healthy as far as I know. On my end, everybody is good, so I’m thankful for that.
I live in Jersey City, which is very close to New York, and obviously New Jersey has a lot of cases as well. My decision was to avoid going home to Holmdel, so I haven’t been home because I don’t want to put my parents at risk. It wasn’t worth it. They are in a high-risk group.
But I FaceTime them pretty much every day. And fortunately my brother is at home. He’s done a great job taking care of them. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to see them, but it’s the right decision in the long run.
From an individual perspective, I’m a player rep. It wasn’t too long ago I was in New York City, in February to help negotiate the CBA on the players’ association side sitting across the table from MLS. But things shifted quickly. The world changed.
When I was named captain, I was really proud, excited. My first thought was: How can I get this team to be the best we can be? How can I get the most out of my teammates? I was thinking purely from a sports perspective. But that shifted quickly in the last month. Instead of soccer, now we’re talking about health and wellness — that’s the most important thing.
Personally I’ve tried to stay as informed as possible on what’s been going on. I’ve been watching Gov. Murphy and Gov. Cuomo every day so I could relay that information to my teammates to try to keep guys as informed as possible.
The player rep from each team has been able to get on a conference call with commissioner Don Garber. He’s got a lot on his plate, but he took time to chat with us. It was great to hear from him. It was great to know he’s thinking about us.
The goal right now is still to play the whole 34-game regular season. But there’s lots of unknowns, a lot of ifs, lots of uncertainty. We’re all going to have to be flexible.
Hopefully we can play a full season, but you never know how it’s going to unfold, and this is going to take time. I don’t want to give anyone false hope. That’s obviously a best-case scenario. We have to see how this plays out.
We have video chat workouts on Zoom with our fitness coaches where we’re all together, showing our faces. We have film sessions for attackers, defenders, specific positions like center midfielders. Every Friday we have video chats, randomize it in groups of three and just catch up with each other.
We have different individualized fitness programs. Tony Jouaux, our fitness coach is doing an excellent job, he’s looking at a lot of data. The health and wellness app records sleep, our moves, any sickness we may be feeling and anything else.
We also log our training data. We have a GPS tracking running app. We do the workout that our fitness coach Tony provides, and then screenshot that to him so he can put it in his database, track how we’re maintaining our fitness as an individual but also as a team based on position. So there’s a lot of ways that we’re trying to stay engaged.
The most important thing is to stay safe and stay healthy, but maximize our time away from each other so that when we finally get together that we can hit the ground running as a team.