What it’s like to be a female college athlete

Balancing school and a social life can be a real challenge. But what happens once you bring playing a collegiate sport into the picture?

The Tab sat down with Penn State Women’s Lacrosse goalkeeper, McKenna Coyle, to see what it’s like to be a female college athlete and in the shadow of some more popular sports.

How do you balance academics and sports?

You just find time and we schedule classes earlier during the day so we would have classes anywhere from eight to one and you have that time of maybe an hour or two to grab lunch before we have practice and then usually after that we either have a tutor or personally for me I would just go home, eat a quick dinner and study for the rest of the night.

What is your typical training day?

During our off season we’ll have three days a week with an hour of conditioning and an hour of lifting and on our two days off we’ll have what’s called captain practices and we’ll have an hour of scrimmage or some kind of practice. In season we go everyday and have two hours of practice and 45 minutes of lifting and we have one day off.

Does it affect you that the Penn State football team is more praised than other sports at Penn State?

I mean yeah it kind of affects us because my sport is in the spring so we’re not necessarily competing with football, but even in the spring there’s that Blue and White scrimmage and more people will go honestly to a scrimmage than our actual game, which is just like between the Blue and White team. It’s just between teams, but we have actual games where we’re competing against people and like they will come out, they’ll support that more than our games or other sports team.

How do you deal with the fact that women’s team are less congratulated as a sophomore?

I’m used to it by now because in my high school it was different because our football team wasn’t as big and the other sports were. Now as a sophomore you kind of get used to it. I got to know people on the football team and you kind of get used to it just as the fact that okay we take secondary or even behind competing in women’s sports and we even take secondary to other men’s sports.

Do you think the Women’s Lacrosse Team would do better if you had a bigger audience?

I think it would pump us up a lot more for games to see so many people in the stands and we have a hill on our field so we always say, “fill the hill” and have a lot of people come. I think it would honestly get us more hyped for games to see a lot of people because when we have a bunch of fans in the crowd, a lot of them are parents. We would definitely get more pumped up by hearing the fans cheering for us. We want to compete and we want to do well for not only our programs, but our fans, so I think it would help us a lot more if more people came out to our games.

Does it bother you that the football team gets more attention while the Penn State Women’s Lacrosse just won the BIG TEN championship and made it to the playoffs?

Speaking from my perspective, it’s frustrating because we make it so far and we do so well and we promote our university, but we still don’t get recognized. We made it to Elite 8 and playoffs. We’re on a seven game winning streak, but everybody could care less.

Is there any animosity between varsity women’s and men’s teams?

I don’t think so. Between the women’s and men’s team in each sports, you’ve got to compete and men’s lacrosse didn’t do nearly as well as we did last year, but even men’s lacrosse still gets better opportunities, which is frustrating, but it becomes such a routine because we’re women so it doesn’t really matter.