Season Interrupted: Culver City’s Mekhi Evans-Bey was there for his mother
Throughout the spring, The Times will interview high school seniors whose athletic careers were cut short by the coronavirus outbreak.
Name: Mekhi Evans-Bey
School: Culver City
Sport: Football, track.
Key stats: The standout running back was the defending Southern Section Division 2 400-meter champion with a best time of 48.18 seconds in 2019.
Fall plans: Undecided, plans to play football and run track in college.
A look at the high school sport standouts whose seasons were cut short by the coronavirus outbreak.
On the sudden cancellation of the track season:
“It hurt me a lot. Track and football I’ve been doing all my life. Now I’m doing boxing.”
How boxing helps his training for other sports:
“It’s helping me for football, keeping my shoulders strong, my legs strong, my stamina up. I run on the treadmill five miles a day.”
On life without sports:
“I really don’t think of anything but sports. That’s the only thing on my mind. I’ve been doing 300 push-ups in the morning and 300 at night since I was 15.”
Where he sees himself in 10 years:
“Either in the Olympics or in the league for football. If sports doesn’t work out, I want to be a firefighter.”
Culver City baseball standout Joaquin Hines, who is planning to attend Fresno State, wants to be a role model for black ballplayers.
How the pandemic changed him:
“It’s changed me because my mom had the coronavirus and I was taking care of her. I was nervous. She got better but at the time, it was rough.”
And a word from his mom, Traci Brown, who learned she had the coronavirus in March:
“The virus was terrible. If I didn’t have this young man taking care of me, I don’t know what I would have done. He took me to the doctor appointments; he picked up my medicine; he made me soup; he made me tea. He would get me up in the middle of the night when I was real sick to do breathing treatment and would physically pick me up. He was such an inspiration.”
Video interviews of each athlete can be found at latimes.com/sports/highschool.
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