Yuliia Zhytelna woke her dad up with the phone call. Ten hours separate Sacramento, where the redshirt freshman tennis player at Cal State Northridge had just finished a match, and her native Ukraine.
She was hoping he could debunk reports she had seen on social media of Russian missiles hitting the airport near her hometown of Kyiv, the capital. He wasn’t aware, but when her father called back a short time later, she heard heavy breathing.
“Yuliia, it’s war.”
Earlier in the day, Zhytelna had competed in a doubles match with her partner, Ekaterina Repina, who is Russian. Now they were both trying to make sense of something outside their grasp.
Oklahoma tennis player Sasha Pisareva was in a similar state of panic. The city where her mom was living, Kharkiv, was among those that were first bombed and Pisareva couldn’t immediately reach her. Finally, her mom called her on her cell phone — an expensive call that was different from how they usually communicated.
“I’m OK,” she told her…
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