How are WNBA players spending their quarantined days?

How are WNBA players keeping themselves sane and entertained in quarantine and isolation around the world?

It is possible, we now know, to cancel the sporting events, to send everybody inside, to postpone the competitions.

It is not possible, however, to destroy the competitive spirit of the WNBA players currently experiencing the global pandemic as we all are. Napheesa Collier, reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year, has simply redirected it away from her Minnesota Lynx pursuits, for the moment, toward her parents and fiance instead, back home with them in Missouri.

“I bought about six different kinds of games,” Collier said in a phone interview. “Two different kinds of Monopoly, bought The Game of Life, bought a puzzle, a bunch of different stuff. So that’s what we’ve been doing to entertain ourselves.”

Entertain? Well, this is still Collier, the unstoppable force on the glass, relentless defender so gameplay happens the Napheesa Collier way.

“Oh, I get so mad,” she said, laughing. “It’s not even fun for me to play sometimes because I get so mad.”

This is the new reality for WNBA players, just as for the rest of the world. How they got to this point differs greatly, though, a realization that the ground under their feet was shifting, coming to that conclusion at different points.

For Blake Dietrick, who’d been playing in Spain with Gernika, it was an impromptu meeting with the team, including coaches, and the team president on March 12.

“Thursday morning, everything had changed,” Dietrick recalled. ”Trump had declared the travel ban, which I know didn’t affect American citizens, but it was still a wake-up call for everyone that things were going to continue to escalate really quickly. Our president sat everyone down, the Spanish players and the foreign players and basically said, ‘Look, this is the situation. We have suspended all play for two weeks minimum in the Spanish league. If you want to go home, we will let you and we will help you get there.’”

For Dietrick, that decision was an easy one. She saw what was happening in Italy, both the closures and the dramatic increase in illnesses, figured the same thing would soon come to Spain, and she got on a plan to get home to Massachusetts right away, to be with her family. She’s still in quarantine for 14 days, though, and so are her parents, simply by virtue of their contact with her.

Just how completely the world had changed hit home for her on that Lufthansa flight, as she sat, masked, surrounded by others similarly adorned. As the plane touched down, a flight attendant took the microphone and said: “Oh, this is our last flight to Boston for the season. We don’t know when we’ll be back. But we hope you all enjoyed it.”

That quarantine experience is shared by so many, including Isabelle Harrison of the Dallas Wings, who experienced a parallel closing in Italy. Harrison said it felt like “almost by the hour, things were changing. It was getting worse and worse and worse.”

Harrison had traveled with her team, Bologna, to Palermo. The latter was declared a red zone, total shutdown. So suddenly Harrison faced the real question of whether she’d even be able to get back to her temporary home in Bologna, let alone back to America. Basketball wasn’t the biggest question anymore, a shame: Harrison had been dominant in Italy, scoring 32, 28 and 23 points in her last three games.

But by that same Friday, she’d gotten a plane home. She’s part of a big family, but for now, she is a unit of one, quarantining for two weeks in a nearby hotel for the safety of her relatives.

“I’m already going stir crazy,” Harrison said. “But I’m in Dallas right now and I’m pretty close to where my sister stays, so when it’s all said and done, I’ll get to go home with her and my nieces and nephews, and just have some company. I know I’m going to wish when I get there, man, I miss my hotel room right now, because they’re constantly on me. They want me to do everything. But it would be nice to have some company.”

Basketball is never far from the minds of these players, even in times like these. For Kia Nurse, who says she gets her best work done in private anyway, it doesn’t mean a significant change in her workout routine, back home in Canada.

“I try to keep everything pretty close quarters with myself,” Nurse said. “I don’t let cameras in the gym or lots of people in the gym. For the most part, it’s really just me and one other person or one other rebounder. So, if it’s got to be just me and the ball and the hoop, that’s the easy way to be, too.”

Even so, life is changed for Nurse: she isn’t visiting her grandparents in person right now. Her family of sports fans and players — her brother, Darnell, plays in the NHL — doesn’t have games to watch these days. She’s hard at work, instead, on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with her mom, of a multicolored birdhouse in a tree.

“We have a good one going on the coffee table right now, and it seems like every moment we get, we kind of sit down, put a couple of pieces in, and then go and do something else and come back,” Nurse said.

Dietrick’s got a puzzle in the works, too, along with some in-family games of Anagrams that, per Dietrick, “can get pretty heated.” Her puzzle is both a memory and aspirational, a look at where she could go again, once the current crisis is over.

“It is of the town of Oia in Santorini,” Dietrick said. “I played in Greece two seasons ago, and when my parents and I went to Santorini, we stayed in one of the little apartments on the cliff. And you can actually see the apartment that we stayed in, in this puzzle. So I’m very excited to get to that point and find our little apartment and complete this one.”

Dietrick, ever the reader, is also working on Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath. Jewell Loyd is reading Seven Financial Cheat Codes, a book on financial planning by Michael Higgins, and other books on real estate. And of course, everyone is binge-watching: Nurse’s current show is The Blacklist, Loyd went back to an old familiar, Parks and Recreation, and Harrison is telling the world to see Passengers, a movie with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.

Oh, and of course, Harrison is “enjoying my time making Tik Toks. That’s another thing that’s going on right now.”

Then when all that inside time gets to be too much, Harrison goes outside to run and get her workout in — the hotel gym closed several days ago, so she said she puts up with the surprised looks of others as she puts in her work. Loyd has gone a step further, and is putting her daily workouts up on social media, both to hold herself accountable and provide workout options for anyone on the off chance they’ve managed to become as fit as Jewell Loyd somehow.

But every player I spoke to had two other things in common as well. To play professional basketball as a woman is to experience the endless grind, 12-month seasons without pause, WNBA into overseas play. That’s changing in the newly-signed CBA, but phased in. So for most WNBA players, this moment, fraught as it is, also allows for the luxury of recovery.

“We never get this amount of time off,” Harrison said. “We’re WNBA players. So I have been resting like no other, I’ve never been able to get this rest.”

They are also uniquely trained for what we’re all being asked to do: see loved ones at a distance, using Facetime or Skype, and stay inside for long periods of time. That is the overseas professional basketball experience for so many players, has been for years.

“For us WNBA players, we’re pretty much isolated when we go overseas,” Loyd said. “We’re in a different country. A lot of us don’t speak the same language as the countries that we’re in… Normally if you go to practice, go to the store, do what we need to do and come back home and be safe and watch Netflix. We’re used to being alone. So for me, it’s not super farfetched from what I’ve been doing for the past five, six years. So I kind of feel normal.”

This is normal for all of us, now. The greatest players in the world, inside as we are, and none of us know when we’ll get to see each other again, you in the stands, me in the press box, them on the court, amazing us all with their skills.

They dream of that, of course, but they dream, too, of the small things. Jewell Loyd talked of a summer night out, eating ice cream. Izzy Harrison just wants to go to to the salon and “get my toes done”.

And Blake Dietrick wants what we all want, an unfulfilled closeness, that scarcity of touch all over the world at this perilous time.

“Just hug the people I am close to who I’m not in quarantine with,” she said. “I want to see my brother and give him a hug and my teammates and my college friends. Physical interaction is extremely important and there’s only so much you can do over FaceTime and phone calls. I’ve learned that obviously living overseas. At the end of the day, [I want] to be able to see those people and let them know in person how much they mean to me and how important they are in my life. I’m really looking forward to that.”