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Proch, from Italy, has lessons to share from home
3/30/2020 1:32:00 PM | Men's Soccer
Daniele Proch, NCFC’s rookie from Italy has coronavirus lessons to share from home
From his apartment in the Triangle, Daniele Proch plays cards online for a few hours a day with his family back in Italy, where they are hunkered down a few hours from the epicenter of that country's coronavirus disaster zone.
The North Carolina FC midfielder and former Duke all-American knows all too well what happened back home, where hospitals were overwhelmed and the death toll skyrocketed. Which is why he's trying to spread the lessons of that experience here.
"I tell my roommates and my teammates that it's more serious than we think, because now we kind of have the luck to look at other countries and learn from their mistakes," Proch said. "So I think we have the opportunity to respect social distancing earlier, not make stupid choices, and prevent the spread. All we hear about is flattening the curve, right? Prevent the spread earlier than Italy. Because Italy, they didn't take it seriously from the beginning."
Proch is from Riva del Garda, a small lakeside town in the Italian Alps, in the northern part of the country but to the east of the Lombardy region, where the disease has ravaged big cities like Bergamo and Brescia and Milan. As of Thursday, 4,860 of Italy's 8,165 deaths attributed to COVID-19 were in Lombardy. The northern part of the country has the most advanced health-care system in Italy, and even there it has been insufficient to handle the demand.
Proch's mother, father and brother are all in Riva del Garda. His grandmother is in an even smaller town, Cavrasto, deeper in the mountains, where neighbors drop off groceries on her doorstep. They're living what may be a version of our future, a few weeks from now, where police challenge anyone on the street and patrol with megaphones telling people to stay inside.
They're allowed to go out to buy groceries or fill prescriptions or walk dogs, but that's it. And after seeing what happened in Lombardy, they understand why. The Trento region has a small fraction of cases compared to its (more populous) neighbor, and would like it to stay that way.
"For some days, people were not understanding why this was killing people so quickly and such big numbers," Proch said. "I have some friends in Milan, they were saying in the beginning, people went skiing the weekend before and now they're all infected. We're seeing the outcome of that right now, the aftermath. But then at some point it became too long. They were almost saying listen, we don't have any answers anymore. The hospitals were full. They were setting up emergency rooms outside of the hospitals. Probably you read about doctors choosing who to save and who dies.
"Where I live, it's just outside of Lombardy. For some reason we were not hit as hard as Lombardy, Bergamo, Brescia. Where I'm from, it's just the average rate of infection that hit us. It's been dramatic. Especially you consider now, the virus is supposed to spread south, and there's the worry that people won't listen, will not respect social distancing, and the hospitals are not as good."
Proch moved to the United States in 2016 to play at Catawba College, the Division II school in Salisbury. After one season there, he transferred to Duke, where he played his final three seasons before signing with NCFC in February. He was tied for fourth in the ACC with 12 goals last season and was third as a junior with 11.
So he's here now, where Proch and his NCFC teammates are sequestered in small groups of roommates, unable to train or practice as a team, trying desperately to stay fit. Proch does body-weight exercises and jumps rope, but individual skills and fitness are only one piece of the soccer puzzle, which at its finest expression is 11 players moving as one.
The best Proch can do is two, kicking a ball around with roommate and shelter-in-place buddy Alex Comsia, who played at North Carolina.
"You can only train by yourself for so long," Proch said. "It would probably be easier if you were a basketball player, because you can practice your shot. As a soccer player, you need your teammates to train."
It's not exactly how he envisioned the beginning of his first pro season. At the same time, he knows as well as anyone why it has to be that way.
"I hope in North Carolina we are social distancing," Proch said. "I can't speak for the entire state. But speaking for my teammates, I think we're doing a pretty good job."
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The North Carolina FC midfielder and former Duke all-American knows all too well what happened back home, where hospitals were overwhelmed and the death toll skyrocketed. Which is why he's trying to spread the lessons of that experience here.
"I tell my roommates and my teammates that it's more serious than we think, because now we kind of have the luck to look at other countries and learn from their mistakes," Proch said. "So I think we have the opportunity to respect social distancing earlier, not make stupid choices, and prevent the spread. All we hear about is flattening the curve, right? Prevent the spread earlier than Italy. Because Italy, they didn't take it seriously from the beginning."
Proch is from Riva del Garda, a small lakeside town in the Italian Alps, in the northern part of the country but to the east of the Lombardy region, where the disease has ravaged big cities like Bergamo and Brescia and Milan. As of Thursday, 4,860 of Italy's 8,165 deaths attributed to COVID-19 were in Lombardy. The northern part of the country has the most advanced health-care system in Italy, and even there it has been insufficient to handle the demand.
Proch's mother, father and brother are all in Riva del Garda. His grandmother is in an even smaller town, Cavrasto, deeper in the mountains, where neighbors drop off groceries on her doorstep. They're living what may be a version of our future, a few weeks from now, where police challenge anyone on the street and patrol with megaphones telling people to stay inside.
They're allowed to go out to buy groceries or fill prescriptions or walk dogs, but that's it. And after seeing what happened in Lombardy, they understand why. The Trento region has a small fraction of cases compared to its (more populous) neighbor, and would like it to stay that way.
"For some days, people were not understanding why this was killing people so quickly and such big numbers," Proch said. "I have some friends in Milan, they were saying in the beginning, people went skiing the weekend before and now they're all infected. We're seeing the outcome of that right now, the aftermath. But then at some point it became too long. They were almost saying listen, we don't have any answers anymore. The hospitals were full. They were setting up emergency rooms outside of the hospitals. Probably you read about doctors choosing who to save and who dies.
"Where I live, it's just outside of Lombardy. For some reason we were not hit as hard as Lombardy, Bergamo, Brescia. Where I'm from, it's just the average rate of infection that hit us. It's been dramatic. Especially you consider now, the virus is supposed to spread south, and there's the worry that people won't listen, will not respect social distancing, and the hospitals are not as good."
Proch moved to the United States in 2016 to play at Catawba College, the Division II school in Salisbury. After one season there, he transferred to Duke, where he played his final three seasons before signing with NCFC in February. He was tied for fourth in the ACC with 12 goals last season and was third as a junior with 11.
So he's here now, where Proch and his NCFC teammates are sequestered in small groups of roommates, unable to train or practice as a team, trying desperately to stay fit. Proch does body-weight exercises and jumps rope, but individual skills and fitness are only one piece of the soccer puzzle, which at its finest expression is 11 players moving as one.
The best Proch can do is two, kicking a ball around with roommate and shelter-in-place buddy Alex Comsia, who played at North Carolina.
"You can only train by yourself for so long," Proch said. "It would probably be easier if you were a basketball player, because you can practice your shot. As a soccer player, you need your teammates to train."
It's not exactly how he envisioned the beginning of his first pro season. At the same time, he knows as well as anyone why it has to be that way.
"I hope in North Carolina we are social distancing," Proch said. "I can't speak for the entire state. But speaking for my teammates, I think we're doing a pretty good job."
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