Ukrainian athletes at California universities try to stay strong, positive while war rages

They’re homesick and sick with worry, stuck in a situation where the only recourse is to be a rock for their families, rock stars in their own orbits. To live well.

To try to be happy.

It’s an impossible mission, but Anastasiia Slivina, a rower at USC, and Yuliia Zhytelna, a tennis player at Cal State Northridge, they’re doing their best.

Because the home they’re pining for is Kyiv, Ukraine’s cosmopolitan capital, with all the history and culture and nature running through it, where their families are hunkered down, afraid but “staying strong,” as Slivina put it, “and believing in our win.”

Ukraine has been under siege since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022, starting a bitter, bloody battle that’s become the largest land war in Europe since World War II.

Zhytelna’s parents and three of her four siblings are there, in Kyiv. So is Slivina’s 19-year-old brother, who isn’t permitted to leave Ukraine, and mother – a doctor who has earned an award from the government there for her work over the past year – who wouldn’t go without him.

They insist that Anastasiia and Yuliia stay put, out of harm’s way in Southern California, where they came to compete. To study journalism or international relations. To experience America.

Now, for now, there’s no going back.

“I miss home so badly!” said Zhytelna, the tennis player who hopped on a Zoom call recently wearing trendy round-rimmed eyeglasses. Her energy brightens a display; it’s easy to see why she’s won over coaches and teammates, professors and a retired pediatrician with whom she stays.

“I wanted to come back in December,” she said. “But my parents said, ‘Stay. Do your thing. You will come back when there’s not sirens and no missile danger and stuff like that.’”

“Yeah, my family says the same thing,” said Slivina, 22, the rower with long, expertly manicured fingernails. She’s someone who thinks deeply, her coach said, about every statement she makes, cognizant always of who and what she represents – especially, probably, on this Zoom with Zhytelna and a reporter.

“You never know,” Slivina continued, “where the missile’s gonna fall, and if it’s gonna fall on you those days that you’re there. Or whatever else can happen. But it’s actually very hard being here because there’s a thing, one of our sports (psychologists) told me, when you are safe but some of your loved ones are not …”

“Survivors syndrome?” Zhytelna offered.

That’s it. “Survivor guilt,” Slivina said.

“I have the same thing!” Zhytelna said.

“Technically, I’m safe,” Slivina explained. “I am fed, I’m warm, I’m a student, I wake up, I do my daily stuff. But there in my country, people are in full war. And you feel guilty and you feel like you would rather be there. And you feel like you’re not supposed to be happy.

“But my mom was like, ‘I know how you feel, but we are so, so happy that you are there and not here. You have to be strong and keep doing your thing. And someday in the future, you’ll do something for our country.’

“And I definitely will.”

AN ESCAPE, BUT NO ELIXIR

Part of what they’re doing now – despite their anxiety, or maybe, in some part, because of it? – is excelling at their sports.

A dedicated, stalwart trainer, Slivina is making good on those attributes that USC women’s rowing coach Josh Adam says got him to recruit her in the first place, including contributing to the Trojans’ season-opening 7-0 victory over UCLA last month.

And Zhytelna, after failing to crack the Matadors’ lineup last season as a redshirt freshman, is 12-4 in singles play and 12-5 in doubles, her turbulent relationship with tennis having taken a U-turn for the better.

Sports are many things. Entertainment. Distraction. Something to bond over. And sometimes an out-and-out outlet, like last month, after the video circulated of Oleksandr Matsievskyi, a Ukrainian prisoner of war, being executed by Russian soldiers.

The world saw the 42-year-old former electrician standing in a shallow ditch, calmly puffing on a cigarette, wearing fatigues but unarmed, a Ukrainian insignia on his sleeve and “Slava Ukraini” on his lips.

His final unflinching words – “Glory to Ukraine” – spread on Telegram and Twitter, ubiquitous and unavoidable for even Zhytelna, who’d weaned herself off graphic footage from home.

“Everyone saw it uncensored,” she said. “And it got me so angry. The next day, I was playing against Youngstown, and I was so angry. The poor girl, she just met me not in a good spot. I was really, really angry.”

Eliska Masarikova, Youngstown State’s No. 3 singles player, stood no chance: Zhytelna won, 6-0, 6-2.

Sports offer escape sometimes, sure, but they’re not an elixir. So last weekend, against Cal State Fullerton, Zhytelna found herself facing a Russian player and faltered, losing control of her emotions and the match, 0-6, 6-2, 6-3.

“She was just a chicken with her head cut off, sort of the old Yuliia, being frustrated – and then you realized, ‘Look who’s across the net,’” said Gary Victor, who, in his 26 seasons leading the CSUN women’s tennis program, has helped players navigate all types of tragedy, but who hadn’t before had anyone with family living through war.

“It wasn’t a personal thing, but for Yuliia, anything connected to that part of the world right now is an open sore.”

Usually, though – 99% of the time, Victor said – Zhytelna doesn’t show signs of the toll the conflict is taking.

Similarly, Slivina “has been a very professional 90% of the time,” Adam said, “in terms of the herculean effort it takes to make sure the team doesn’t know how much of what’s going on back home is actually affecting her.”

‘LOVE AND CARE’

They’re aware, of course. They’ve shown “a lot of love and care,” said Slivina – “Stassie” to those teammates.

USC’s rowers wore shirts in support of Ukraine in-house. And the staff there made sure Slivina gets the summer classes she needs to maintain her scholarship before she returns for her fifth season – the NCAA’s bonus COVID season coming in clutch.

And last year at Northridge, teammate Magdalena Hedrzak helped the Zhytelna family find a place to stay for a while in her native Poland. Another tennis contact helped get Zhytelna’s younger sister safely into a tennis academy in France. And Yuliia leaned a lot on her doubles partner before she graduated, Ekaterina Repina understanding where she was coming from better than just about anyone, because Repina is Russian.

“Again,” Victor said, “out of the worst of humanity comes the best.”

“That’s what surprised me, that people cared, how much people care about me, specifically,” said Zhytelna, who found a home in Tarzana last summer with Nan Zaitlen, a 74-year-old Jewish woman whose parents survived the Holocaust.

“It is a very two-way street here,” Zaitlen said “In terms of what is done for each other. I really, really care about her because she’s very easy to care about, and she is very caring.

“And I keep telling her: I look forward to visiting her in Kyiv.”