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Taking Five: Fifth Year Athletes Reflect on Extra Year of Eligbility
By Claire Fenton, SportS editor
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When Emory University men’s track and field sprinter Liam Fost received the news in March 2020 that the NCAA was shutting down winter sports due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he assumed that the hiatus would last no longer than a couple of weeks. As weeks stretched into months, Fost watched the precious final months of his athletic career slip away. It wasn’t until the University Athletic Association (UAA) canceled winter sports for the 2020-2021 season — coincidentally, just two days before the NCAA granted all Division III athletes an additional year of athletic eligibility — that Fost became receptive to the possibility of using his fifth year.
“At that point I was like, ‘Okay, what am I going to do next year?’” Fost said. “[I was] realizing I’m dissatisfied with what COVID did to my track career, that I knew I had more to give. Mentally [I was] wanting it and [I was] realizing I can probably work something out.”
At first, Fost, who is on the pre-med track, considered taking a gap year after his undergraduate graduation in May 2021. However, the lingering disappointment from his “unremarkable” spring track season pushed him to explore other academic options, namely a master’s degree in bioethics. Although others tried to persuade Fost to join the workforce instead of returning to school, he was determined to seize the opportunity to extend his track career.
“I was definitely more compelled to [get my master’s] by the fact that I had eligibility to keep running,” Fost said. “I could have worked in clinical and gotten paid. A lot of people probably would have said that’s the right thing to do, [that] it’d be nice to not have the financial burden, [that I’d] be getting all this great experience which would help for med school. It seems like a no-brainer, but for me, I was really compelled to get one more chance to run.”
Emory men’s basketball guard Romin Williams also had no plans to immediately pursue a master’s degree after his undergraduate education until his entire senior season fell victim to the pandemic. Like Fost, Williams wanted to maximize his time as an Emory athlete. Taking his fifth year allowed him to finish his athletic career on his own terms while building upon his undergraduate studies at the Goizueta Business School.
“I didn’t want to end only playing three years of college basketball when I’m really supposed to have four,” Williams said. “I did some research within Emory to try to find a program within the school that I [had] already been at for the last three years, and that’s when I found an MSBA (MS in Business Analytics) program.”
Williams continued to train with his teammates and had the full support of his coaching staff, who assured him he would be welcomed back for his fifth year if he chose that path. However, Williams explained that no one on his team was fully equipped to help him navigate the challenges and workload the program demanded.
“I’m the first one to do the program that I did from the basketball perspective,” Williams said. “It’s not like [my coaches and I] have gone through that before or knew what to expect or who to talk to. I had to be the first one to do this and figure it out and get through it.”
Emory softball infielder and first year Emory Law student Natalie Costero is no stranger to rigorous academics either: while playing softball at Lynn University (Fla.), she obtained her bachelor’s degree in marketing in two and a half years and her master’s degree in business in the remaining one and a half. When Costero learned that she had an additional year of eligibility, she knew she wasn’t ready to give up softball. Nonetheless, the job market uncertainty from the pandemic and her passion for leadership drove Costero to attend the Emory University School of Law — a “once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Initially, Costero had made peace with retiring from softball in favor of advancing her education, but after conversations with head coach Adrianna Baggetta and senior outfielder Megan Weisenberg, her former grade school teammate, she decided to tackle both. While the workload has been incredibly demanding, Costero said she believes the structure softball provided actually improved her work ethic and time management.
“Softball was something that was a constant,” Costero said. “Softball gave me a strict schedule and guided me through my first year of law school. As much as I
Natalie SaNdlow/Staff
