Feature: Volleyball Works to Slow the Spread of COVID-19

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – During a typical spring semester, Brown volleyball rising junior Kristin Sellers and rising senior twin sisters Camberly Moriconi and Gabrielle Moriconi would have a full slate of academic duties and offseason training responsibilities, but with the spread of COVID-19 that typical spring has shifted, with the trio now working to help slow the spread of the pandemic.

Alongside their online coursework and conditioning remotely, all three student-athletes have taken active steps to fight coronavirus in their communities.

Sellers – a native of Menlo Park, Calif. – is working with a California biotech company that is developing treatments for the virus while the Moriconi sisters – who hail from Naples, Fla. – are helping to screen construction site workers for the virus in Florida.

Sellers – an Applied Mathematics-Biology concentrator at Brown – is working with IncellDX, a biotech company that has partnered with another biotech firm, CytoDyn, to develop a treatment for the respiratory problems associated with COVID-19. As part of her job, Sellers is testing the efficacy and dosage of the drugs that are administered to patients.

Sellers worked at Incell during the summer of 2019, and when she departed Brown's campus this past March, her previous employer reached out to her asking if she would return to Incell to help fill a staffing shortage to handle running samples.

For the Moriconis, an old connection also paved the way for them to help in slowing the spread. The sisters' high school coach runs S1-Safety First Drug Testing – a drug testing company that has pivoted its operations to creating screening sites to adapt to the circumstances.

The duo is screening construction site workers for COVID-19 symptoms in an effort to create as safe a work environment as possible. After asking a series of background questions and taking the workers' temperatures, they can then either recommend that the workers proceed to the site or that they go home and self-quarantine for the 14-day period.

All three can point to their experiences as Brown student-athletes in helping prepare them to take on such work while still staying on top of their academic and athletic responsibilities.

"Being a student-athlete at Brown has allowed me to manage this work and my school work outside of volleyball," Sellers said. "It takes a lot of practice because I am working full days, and it is a lot. My experience in biology at Brown has definitely prepared me as well as my prior experience from my internships."

"For me, it's the discipline of being a student-athlete," Camberly said. "It's easy to get cavalier – even though we know COVID-19 is a serious disease and a real threat – it's easy when you're screening so many people throughout the day for 10 hours every day of the week to get lax with that and act like 'you're fine.' Being really meticulous about everything, making sure everyone is showing no symptoms is really important."

"Being a student-athlete on campus at Brown has prepared us for this situation where we are able to work full-time and give back to our community, while keeping up with school work and our online classes," Gabrielle said. "We're doing school work in the evenings and work during the day to stay busy and help in any way that we can."

For each of them, the desire to assist in the effort combatting the pandemic was almost immediate upon returning to their home states.

"I feel really grateful to have been given this opportunity from someone that I have worked with before and the fact that I can make such a big difference," Sellers said. "This drug that we are working on is saving lives and really helping the quality of life for people. The fact that I can make the smallest impact on that is pretty amazing, and I'm really excited about that."

"For all of us, our schedules since we have been very young have been extremely busy," Camberly said. "Now all of a sudden, we find ourselves with a lot more downtime than we are used to. Why not put that into something that can help a lot of other people?"

"Personally, it was finding a way to give back to our community and help in any way that we can," Gabrielle said. "If we have the ability to help, why not get out there and do it?"

For Brown head coach Ahen Kim, he is not at all surprised that his student-athletes have gone to such efforts to fight the pandemic.

"It doesn't surprise me that these three young women as soon as they went home they had the mentality of 'I have this time, what can I do with it now?'" Kim said. "It's humbling to be at a university where I get to serve a small aspect of their lives along the way as they pursue these things. I have three student-athletes on my team that are directly trying to combat this very present, constantly evolving thing. It puts a lot of things in perspective."

Brown University Athletics

Feature: Volleyball Works to Slow the Spread of COVID-19

Players Mentioned

Camberly Moriconi

Gabrielle Moriconi

Kristin Sellers

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