The true life of a student athlete

Student athletes perform amazing feats both in the classroom and in their sport, but the most amazing feat is the balancing act they have to do everyday. Outside of school and practice there’s sleep, meals and food, and maintaining a social life.

They always said it’s not supposed to be easy for the sport – they didn’t say anything about being a student athlete. It’s not easy, it’s actually really really hard, but it’s all worth it, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Our daily schedule

To get our daily schedule, we have to register before the rest of our class because we have to plan around our set practice times. Sometimes it really takes some magic to even get a decent schedule that accommodates practice.

Once we have our daily class schedule set, there’s the extra activity we have that normal students don’t – practice. This extra activity is what forms the rest of our day. Because most sports practice almost every day, classes can be crammed into a tight amount of time, and sometimes we are literally so busy we don’t find time to eat. Teachers who don’t mind us eating in class become favorites compared to those who mind.

Although we may not have a natural gift for it, we need to learn to become very organized and develop good time management skills very quickly because half of our time and energy is focused on our sport. Learning these skills takes a lot of practice, and can create a lot of stress until we get them down.

Stress

As a student athlete, academics takes on another meaning – more stress. All students have stress, but it’s different for student athletes. We have less hours in the day to devote to our academics because of practice so there’s the stress of getting everything done, added to the stress of getting it done well. This is added to maintaining a healthy mind and body for practice as well as our own wellbeing, added to whatever extra we want to do, and our social life. All in all, the stress piles up.

To help us with this task, we have a support system in the athletics department of the school to help us learn to manage, and keep us on track in the academics department. Our GPA not only looks good for us, it also looks good for our school. But if the academics aren’t where they need to be, you get suspended from the team until they’re where they need to be. My coach always reminds us that we’re students first – they don’t call us athlete students.

Meals 

Something student athletes have to be more aware about than normal students is what they eat. Food is considered fuel, and we need the right kind of fuel to do well in our sport.

To this effect, we eat slightly healthier than the average student. However, student athletes are always hungry, which means we’re always eating and therefore eat more that normal students. In this case, the healthy eating point doesn’t always stay true. You will never find a student athlete without food, trust me we always have a snack in our bag.

Sleep

Sleep is a craving, and something student athletes don’t get nearly enough of, even though we need it more than normal students. Since being well rested is an important factor to succeeding at practice, we’re more conscious about our sleep and how it affects us.

Sometimes if we’re lucky we can fit in a nap during the day, and it makes a world of difference.

Trying to focus on one thing for so long, and the stress of that one thing can be very mentally draining. Not to mention trying to remember everything we have to do, school and applying to jobs and internships becomes one of the most daunting, and it can really do a number on our minds. The physical fatigue is something that comes with being a student athlete, we accept that our sport will make us hurt, tired, and maybe injured. On top of practice, though, is the running around we have to do for classes and to get everything done around practice. If we have a moment to sit down, we’re going to take it, so the walk to class might be nice sometimes, but we prefer the University shuttle.

Social life

The social life of a student athlete is a variation of the normal student. We can’t keep up the weekly party routine that normal students have, especially if our team goes dry during our on-season, as some teams do. Our team is a big part of our social life, and our teammates are some of our closest friends. We spend so much time with them it’s hard for them to not be. We know the value of teamwork and our effort is limitless.

Of course, there are different kinds of sports, and not all things apply to all sports, but we all have a team, and we can’t let them down. We hold each other up and help each other when we’re down. Teammates have your back and when you’re lost they help you get your priorities straight.

While being in the athlete community is helpful for networking, our busy schedule doesn’t let us to take advantage of it, but we have help with that. There’s even a LinkedIn for athletes called Athlete Network. I sat down with Bruce Greene (SMG ’17), who is BU’s spring intern for Athlete Network, and he told me more about it.

“It’s the biggest social platform for athletes. It’s similar to LinkedIn, but very different. It’s more personal, and it has an extremely high response rates from employers because they’re looking for specific people. The LinkedIn response rate is 14 percent while Athlete Network’s is 84 percent, because there are specifically recruiters on athlete network looking for people interested in them. Athlete Network is also more how to work and be in athletics. It’s hard.”

Spring break

While most people look forward to spring break and the freedom from school and the beaches it brings, athletes look forward to a different spring break – one filled with training, eating, and sleeping. And that’s basically it, with a smattering of naps and homework in between. The spring break training trip lets student athletes focus entirely on their sport.

Over the athlete version of spring break, we can focus more on getting the sleep we need, and eating, basically everything. Even though student athletes may still have homework we need to get done or get ahead on, over break, there’s a whole lot less stress academically.

We’re also less stressed about our sport because we can focus more on it. We don’t have to worry about staying up too late to finish homework that we’re dead at practice the next day. Spring break is basically all practice.

It’s extremely difficult being a student athlete, but we love it and we couldn’t imagine being anything else.