In the spirit and tradition of team, student-athletes share all sorts of things. They share the ups and downs of a season, its great joys and disappointments. They often share locker rooms and living quarters, and even friends.

Some teams take sharing a step further.

During the fall 2000 season, the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, women's volleyball team shared an outbreak of strep throat. A September 12 match with Furman University was postponed because 10 of the team's 12 players, an assistant coach and an athletic trainer experienced strep throat symptoms.

In 1998, the Duke University football team shared a nasty stomach virus, first with themselves, and then with their Florida State University opponents in the first documented case of a virus being transmitted due to contact during an athletics competition. In all, 36 Duke and 11 Florida State athletes were infected.

These were not acts of benevolence, but rather extreme examples of an inevitable reality for many teams and student-athletes throughout a season: Student-athletes get sick, and they can pass illnesses on to their teammates.

What both instances illustrate is the difference in how the topic of illness is approached. UNC-Greensboro volleyball coach Tere Dali said she deferred to the school's athletic trainers in the decision to postpone the match. Karen M. Becker, the author of a New England Journal of Medicine article about the Duke incident, said, "There's nothing the Duke players could have done to prevent getting ill since the virus was in their food, but once they were sick, coaches should not have allowed them to play."

Sickness stigma

Becker's verdict highlights the way illness is viewed in general in the collegiate athletics arena. Often enough, it's something to play with and play through. That's likely because illness is hard to gauge, not readily apparent like a broken bone, and the mentality of the student-athlete about the illness is subjective.

Shannon Stanford, a former Gonzaga University soccer player and current compliance coordinator at her alma mater, said there is a certain stigma associated with being sick instead of injured.

"(Being sick) is a totally different philosophy," she said. "Sick doesn't have the 'bang' that an ankle sprain or an ACL tear does. Sickness is not supposed to slow you down."

Several years back, when Stanford was suffering from a sinus infection during a road trip with her team, forgoing the upcoming match was not an option. "My coach was with me at the pharmacy one hour before warm-ups," she said. "I played the entire game."

The problem can be three-fold. The athlete wants to play. The coach wants the athlete to play. And the athlete doesn't want to let her team down or incur the whispers that perhaps she is "faking it."

Sometimes, it's just a matter of failing to make the connection that continuing to play or practice when sick will negatively affect performance.

Former NCAA Woman of the Year Jamila Demby was a standout track student-athlete at the University of California, Davis. She rarely got sick, but when she did, she would continue to run and train despite how she felt.

"My teammates would see me get ready to go for a run even though I had not fully recovered, and they'd tell me I should rest until I was fully healed, otherwise I'd continue to be sick," she said.

"I never quite 'got' that for myself, although it was something I would tell other athletes to do when they were sick."

Although it's likely the problem will not reach a simple solution, cases like the one at Duke have caught the attention of collegiate athletic trainers.

"(The virus transmission) raises the question with us that at what point do we let them compete?" asked Randy Oravetz, director of sports medicine at Florida State. "At what point do we let them practice?"

If anything, it demonstrates the fact that being sick has the potential to do more harm than being injured.

-- Keri Potts