Being more than 4,000 miles away from home is nothing new to Ramon Vila, but without basketball games to play or supervised workouts to attend, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga redshirt junior’s mind often wanders to his family in Barcelona.
Spain, a country with more than 20,000 cases of coronavirus as of Thursday, is under a national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic while Vila is riding the storm out in his apartment at UTC. He speaks to his parents and grandparents and has been reassured things are well. His parents, Robert Vila and Merce Soley, are doctors, a fact that hasn’t stopped the son from giving safety advice.
“I told them not to get out of their apartment, all the little tips, but they already know,” he said with a laugh. “They know how to take care of themselves, so I’m not that concerned.”
Vila may be away from one family, but he still has a few members of his extended one around him every day. He and three other members of the Mocs men’s basketball program – David Jean-Baptiste, Stefan Kenic and Matt Ryan – are riding out the pandemic in their UTC apartments.
Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / UTC’s Matt Ryan, left, shoves teammate David Jean-Baptiste in celebration during a home basketball game in November 2019. Jean-Baptiste, who is from Miami, and Ryan, who is from New York state, are still in Chattanooga with the remainder of the season canceled and UTC set to hold online classes only for the rest of the semester.Although the 2019-20 season came to a swift and early end, each is trying to stay in basketball shape to some degree and will take part in online classes when UTC begins them Monday for the rest of the spring semester. The university cannot supervise practices or training right now, so each of the four Mocs is taking time to utilize the program’s basketball practice and training facility on Vine Street.