The coronavirus pandemic has devasted the world over the past few months and most contact sports in the United States have been halted to protect both athletes and coaches. However, there is a plan for many sports in the United States to resume in July, including Arizona State women’s basketball.
The Sun Devils are allowed to begin their offseason workout plan Jul. 20 with eight hours of workouts per week permitted. ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said the plan is to ease her players in due to the rust she expects them to show.
“We’ll start really slow because these players … haven’t really been in gyms and had a lot of time to do their normal routines,” Turner Thorne said. “And it’s always our goal in the summer to just improve individually offensively. And hopefully, put in our playbook a little bit. And this year, we kind of need to look at what we have. We have so much newness, and we have some players recovering from surgeries and stuff too, so we won’t have everybody completely out there. But it’ll just give us a good opportunity to kind of see what we have. And just kind of get going. They need to shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.”
Turner Thorne said protocols are still being put in place for how many people can be in the gym at a time for workouts. She said individual offense with some individual defense are the main goals for the summer workouts. She said scrimmaging is not a concern.
While basketball is always of utmost importance to Turner Thorne, something more significant has been on her mind these past few weeks. Recently, she has been active on social media and in the community as an ally for the Black Lives Matter movement following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks to police brutality.
“It’s important for everybody to support that,” Turner Thorne stated. “I’ve seen this injustice my entire life, and we just haven’t moved the needle very much in my lifetime, and I’m just excited right now, to be honest. I have not seen our younger generations be so engaged, so active. I just feel like we have more things in place right now than ever, at least in my lifetime, to actually effectuate some change. It’s great to see, and hopefully, it’ll continue to snowball, and maybe we’ll even pass the Equal Rights Amendment.”
The 2020-21 Sun Devils will be a young team with a whopping seven freshmen on the roster. This means team bonding is even more essential than usual this season. Obviously, in-person bonding has been impossible during the pandemic, yet Turner Thorne said the team has been using Zoom to get to know each other. She said the mood of the calls has been positive.
“We have 14 players,” Turner Thorne explained. “Seven are new. So it’s been a great mood. It’s a lot of freshness, newness, excitement. And it’s just been about getting to know each other.”
It has just not been the players Turner Thorne has been communicating with via Zoom. She said she has also made sure to stay in touch with season ticket holders and donors during this uncertain time. She said the virtual events went “really well.”
In normal times, in-home visits to recruits is a big part of Turner Thorne’s job. Now, with the ongoing recruiting dead period, Turner Thorne has had to shift to virtual recruiting. She said while it has been different, it has been amped up compared to usual.
“But now it’s all virtual visits … Zoom, “ Turner Thorne said. “Which allows you to probably do more than you normally would. It’s not the same as person-to-person, but it’s probably given us an opportunity to visit a few more people. Try to bring ASU to them. We have videos and different slides and things that we show them on our virtual visit.”
An activity Turner Thorne has been doing to occupy her time during the last few months has been reading. She said she keeps in touch with Kandis Richardson, mother of recently graduated Sun Devil great Reili Richardson, and said they exchange book recommendations. She said a Kandis Richardson recommendation titled “You are a Badass”, the faith-based “Love Does” and a few others have been what she has been turning the pages of the past couple of months since the ASU season ended.
As for the coronavirus, Turner Thorne offered a reassuring and positive message to Sun Devil Nation regarding the pandemic and made sure to remind people to be safe and take the necessary precautions to keep themselves and others healthy.
“This too shall pass Sun Devil Nation,” Turner Thorne stated. “We’re a strong, resilient group. Not just the Sun Devil Nation but our country and the world and there’s been moments in time with horrible diseases and obviously we’ve never been smarter and had more science and technology and everything behind us so I’m just really hopeful. I’m really hopeful that we’re going to be able to see sports come back. So I just encourage everybody really to abide by the CDC guidelines. Wear your mask, stay socially distanced, wash your hands.
“I believe those things work, and the sooner everybody does that, the sooner we have Sun Devil sports back.”
