Things Student Athletes Wish You Understood

Many people assume student athletes get special treatment but for the most part we have it just as hard or even harder in the classroom. Professors often don’t understand all it takes to be a student athlete, and can make it difficult to make up your work or expect the work to be finished earlier than the due date when you’ll be missing class for games. There are even some who refuse to give you the notes from the class you missed and we have to find a classmate that we trust to give us an overview of the lesson.

Not all students’ athletes receive enough financial aid to put themselves through school ,therefore some have to work or some have internships to fulfill. So they have to pursue their degree, go to practice, and get their hours in.

For fall sports its coming back early to school for “Hell Week.”Winter sports come back to school a couple days after Christmas, and spring sports can say “Adios” to Spring Break.

While other people are relaxing in the sun or curled up on the couch with a nice cup of hot chocolate, we’re on the field, court, or in the weight room training with our coaches yelling us to go faster, be better, and fight harder.

We don’t just practice once a day,but we have morning practices before class as well to condition. Plus, you have to make your class schedule around your practice time ,so you have to squeeze everything in and  you’re constantly going. You often go straight from class to practice and then have to do your homework afterwards. Then you have away games that take up your "LIT" weekend and the time spent for homework. It’s a straight five- seven months of competition and training, so our lives are not as cool as people may think.

You and every other college student are always hungru. Haha, we get it! But there is a big difference between being tired from a three hour workout mentally and physically than being tired from staying up late doing anything. The best way to an athletes heart is through their stomach and if you can offer a nice place to nap we’ll like you even more.

There are only so many hours in a day, so something has to give. If we want to be great at our sport we have to dedicate extra time to it,but being a good student is also important to many of us because we’re not going to the big leagues , also known as, the professiona league. LOL, some of us are aware that going pro is not in our future.

Therefore, we have to give ourselves enough time to study. This means we might have to say no more often than not when it comes to social activities. If we’re excelling in all three of these areas I promise you we’re low on sleep.

We don’t always like every single teammate we have but that doesn’t mean anyone else can talk about them. Its like having a brother or sister because as much as you might complain, pick on or get frustrated with them you’ll also be the first to stand up and put someone else in their place if they say or do anything to them.

As much as we may complain about being sore, tired, or hungry. No matter how annoyed and frustrated we get with our coaches and teammates. Regardless of how many classes we miss and sleepless nights we endure to catch up on work. Please understand that we can’t just quit. For many of this, this is the one thing we’ve always been good at. We’ve probably played since we were little and cannot imagine a life without our sport. we know that our time will eventually come to an end, several of us these are the last four years , so we want to get it in before it is too late because almost all of us are going pro in something other than sports.