Sacramento Republic FC’s season was cut short. How a young player trains during a shutdown
Andrew Wheeler-Omiunu didn’t plan on leaving the house much anyway.
The 25-year-old midfielder was starting his first season with Sacramento Republic FC when the United Soccer League suspended its season due to the coronavirus outbreak on March 12. Games have been postponed and team practices are not allowed, so all Wheeler-Omiunu can do is a daily individual workout at a local park before returning to his apartment to adhere to California’s stay-at-home order.
“To be honest, it’s not too different,” he said. “I’m single and I live 2,500 miles away from all my family, who are all back in Massachusetts. Before this stay-at-home ordinance was in place, I would go to practice and then I would come home. You don’t really have the energy to go out, so my lifestyle really didn’t change too much.”
He’s even finding time to prepare for life after soccer.
Wheeler-Omiunu, a native of Bellingham, Mass., was a four-year starter at Harvard University. He was selected by Atlanta United with the 46th overall pick in the 2017 MLS SuperDraft and served as a backup on Atlanta’s 2018 MLS Cup championship team. He spent a season with FC Tucson of USL League One and Phoenix Rising FC of the USL Championship league before signing with the Republic in December.
With Wheeler-Omiunu in the starting lineup, the Republic opened its season with a 1-1 draw against FC Tulsa on March 7 before a sellout crowd at Papa Murphy’s Park. The team was preparing for a trip to Las Vegas when the season was suspended. A week later, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered nearly 40 million California residents to stay home to combat the spread of COVID-19, an order Wheeler-Omiunu has taken quite seriously.
“I try to listen to other people who have more knowledge and information than I do on matters I don’t know enough about,” Wheeler-Omiunu said. “I think one of the scariest things is the unknown, and if I were to be so arrogant to believe the things I don’t know won’t hurt me, I think that would be shortsighted.”
Wheeler-Omiunu said Republic FC holds regular videoconferences to keep players, coaches and staff engaged as they await a return to normalcy. Players have been divided into groups that compete in conditioning drills and skills challenges. Each player reports his results so the leader board can be updated each day.
“It’s just another way to stay connected,” Wheeler-Omiunu said. “We’ve even done trivia games to create some competition within the group.”
Wheeler-Omiunu is an accredited vocalist who appeared on a recent episode of “MLS Idle: Soccer’s Hidden Talents” on Facebook and Twitter. He likes to read and play the piano, and said he has devoted much of his free time during the coronavirus shutdown to a pursuit that might serve him well when he retires from soccer – computer coding.
“I’m very interested in web design,” he said. “If I ever want to promote myself, I wouldn’t want to hire somebody to do that for me. I would want to create my own website.”
Wheeler-Omiunu is eager to play the game he loves when soccer returns, but he knows he can’t play forever.
“I realize how quickly it’s going to end whenever it does end,” he said. “That kind of motivates me to use my free time while I have it to pursue and enrich my life on matters that might be able to sustain me after professional athletics.”
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
