The Long Island sports world, lax world, college athletics world, & ultimately the world at large was rocked this last wk w the loss of Aidan Kaminska, 19, a redshirt freshman on the UMass lax team.
This story hits close to home, as Aidan was born out east on LI, Stony Brook, where we’d just had our mtgs w the University last wk, & played his HS lacrosse at Port Jefferson, also out east on the north shore.
For those who’ve grown up on LI & gone to school there, any decade you attended, you’re familiar w an athlete/student like Aidan. LI’s known as a hotbed of lax – a feeder system into college athletics. I look at Aidan’s pic & my mind races thinking of abt 10 guys I went to HS w many yrs ago, who were “the same guy” – hard worker, super athletic, competitive as can be, lived & breathed the sport, also friendly w a great heart.
All we know – from the media, from the fam, & from the obituary is that Aidan died “unexpectedly” this past wk.
The college sports world is reeling right now. No exaggeration, I had over 20 DMs/texts asking: “was this a suicide?” We don’t know & I don’t know. But the college sports world is traumatized w all the losses. I could chalk all the questions up to humans being humans & wanting to know reasons/causes, but I think we’re a step beyond that.
We’ve seen too many “unexpected” losses recently:
5 w/in the last 2+ months, before this one in the college athlete community (that we know of), & that’s where our minds immediately go.
This is trauma. When the shoe drops many times in a row, our nervous systems come to expect it. That’s what happened w me & my brother’s ailments over all those yrs. Every time the phone rang – didn’t matter who in the fam was calling, my brain defaulted to: it must be bad news…something must’ve happened to him again.
For now, let’s focus on comforting the Kaminska’s. We don’t need to know the cause of death to know that this is a tragic loss. I’ve been to the fam’s Facebook page & there are some beautiful notes written there in support of his mom/their fam, from strangers who just want to be there for them. Lots of “same here’s” from mom’s who lost their sons.