Madison Tipton doesn’t know how she got COVID-19.
The rising senior at Heritage Academy didn’t travel anywhere. She wasn’t exposed to anyone she knew to have the disease, either.
But one day a few weeks ago, the symptoms hit Tipton hard: a headache, a cough and nausea.
“It felt like any other flu,” Tipton said.
She went to a clinic in West Point for rapid testing and found she was positive for the disease, which is caused by the novel coronavirus. Then she went home to quarantine.
But as of Tuesday’s home game against Leake Academy, Tipton is back on the field for the Patriots — with one major takeaway from her experience with the virus.
“I wasn’t really scared of it, but now I think I should have stayed home more,” she said.
She said she was somewhat “traveling the streets” of Columbus, inviting the inherent risk of the highly transmissible disease but believing she’d be fine.
“I’m a teenager, so it’s not as hard on me,” Tipton said.
But her symptoms begged to differ, especially the first few days. Tipton lives with her grandparents, and her grandmother also contracted the virus, worrying the center fielder considerably.
“It’s not as hard on the young kids — yeah, you have symptoms, but you can recover from it a lot easier than the older generation,” she said.
Tipton and her grandmother spent the better part of two weeks recovering while Tipton’s grandfather kept to the other side of the house to avoid being infected.
“They were kind of mad, but they were also like, ‘It’s not your fault,'” Tipton said. “There’s no telling where I could have gotten it from.”
Ultimately, Tipton said, her own symptoms were worse than her grandmother’s. They forced Tipton to miss the start of her senior softball season, which was difficult, too. She had to sit out for nearly three weeks and couldn’t participate in the final season opener of her high school career alongside fellow seniors Carley Martin, McKenzie Rhett and Sara Kate Thompson.
“It was crazy because I couldn’t experience the last first game with them,” Tipton said. “It was really hard on me.”
Heritage Academy coach Heidi Matthews described Tipton as an “all-around great kid” with a strong arm and bat as well as a leader among the Patriots, and losing her even for a few weeks wasn’t easy.
But Tipton saw the team’s younger players — freshmen Anna Harrell and Avery Russell, eighth grader Jeoreia Henry and seventh grader Bella Sotomeneses — step up in her stead.
“All the little kids, they have come so far from whenever they started,” Tipton said. “It’s been amazing. I’m so proud of them.”
Now, Tipton has made her return to school and softball, and while fighting COVID-19 was hard, she’s happy to be healthy and back on the field.
“I love my team so much,” Tipton said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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