Photo courtesy of Stonehill Athletics
Junior wide receiver Connor Walsh looks to be a key weapon for Stonehill’s offense in the next two years.
By Desmond Bernal
While many students were deciding on being either fully remote, commuting, or an on-campus student, junior Connor Walsh had to decide on what sport he would be playing this year.
Football or Basketball.
“A lot went into it. It was probably one of the toughest decisions I’ve made in a while I would say,” Walsh said.
With the cancelation of fall and winter sports up in the air due to COVID, Walsh had to figure out what would be the most idealistic situation for him to manage school and athletics.
He said he needed to think about practice schedules for both sports and how COVID would influence them.
“Not really knowing when seasons would happen it kind of provided a level of stress where it was like ‘hey this could be really tough to play two sports in the same season,’” Walsh said.
Walsh, a two-sport athlete here at Stonehill, has always played more than one sport. He said his high school, The Boys’ Latin School of Maryland, encouraged students to play three sports.
Basketball has been Walsh’s bread and butter growing up with sports.
“I actually have been playing basketball for my whole life and that is kind of where everything happened for me basketball-wise,” he said.
Walsh played basketball for three years at Glenelg Country School. During his junior year, he transferred to The Boys’ Latin School of Maryland where he got introduced to football.
“I’ve always loved watching it, I just never ever played, but at my second high school, I started playing and I really fell in love with it,” Walsh said.
Walsh originally visited Stonehill for basketball over the summer of his sophomore year going into his junior year. He found himself back visiting the campus of Stonehill the next year, this time for another reason, football.
On his official visit for football, he talked with the coaches of the team. He said that this was where the opportunity was raised to him when the coaches told him that they wanted him to play both [football and basketball] at Stonehill.
“I came to college not really expecting to play two sports, but you know Stonehill provided the opportunity, and I really just jumped on it,” Walsh said. “I wanted to do it and I had so much fun doing it.”
Walsh loved the opportunity to play two sports and he said it helped provide a different level of social aspect.
“Meeting all different types of people, who are coming for different opportunities,” he said.
Walsh said that two sports also taught him to become more structured and organized academically.
“Playing two sports, sometimes you have two different schedules like either workouts or lifts for the two sports during a day. That will consume about four to five hours of your day, so you really got to know that going into it,” he said. “Setting time aside for that [schoolwork] is crucial and planning your days out day by day, so you know what you got is also huge.”
Walsh said that not only can it be a challenge academically, but, as he saw last year, it can be challenging physically hopping right into basketball after his football season concluded.
“Body-wise my sophomore year, the first week of basketball coming straight from football, I got a lot of shin splints and it ended up going into a stress fracture. That kind of hurt me a bit and hurt me to get into basketball my sophomore year.” Walsh said.
He said that COVID and his history of injuries with basketball were the deciding factors in making his decision to play football indefinitely moving forward with his career at Stonehill.
This decision will be the moving point in his football career and allow him to put more energy into and fine-tune his skills.
“I think it is providing me especially right now, even though we are not doing a ton. I just have more time to work out on my own,” Walsh said.
Walsh felt this will allow him to get some extra reps after practice with the quarterbacks and work on things he could before because he would have to focus some energy in the gym with basketball.
While Walsh loves the Stonehill basketball team and coaches, he has shifted his focus to football.
“I think football is just the best way to go right now just to do the one and focus my energy on that and hopefully be the best I can be for football in these next two years,” Walsh said.