Many people ask how it's possible to manage playing a high-level college sport while going to an equally renowned university. When you have practice every night, travel all over the US to places like Chicago, St. Louis, NYC, Boston, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Cleveland, you would think that managing a full day of tough classes would simply be out of the picture. However, it is not nearly as hard as you think, and I'll list a few reasons that make managing two huge commitments possible!
- Coaches and professors are understanding! That's the number one thing I would say. If you simply communicate with coaches and professors early and in a polite manner, they will be willing to make accommodations. A lot of coaches realize you may have to take a late lab, or you may need to miss part of practice for a review session for a tough test. The same is true for professors. They realize that sometimes you are going to be traveling, and they can allow you to take tests on the road or even take the test later.
- You will have more time in college. More than you have ever had before in your life. Typically, a high school student goes to school for 6-8 hours, then if they are playing a sport, will have practice for an additional 1-2 hours. In college, you will realize that you have class a few hours a day, practice for 1-2 hours still, and then nothing but free time. This time can be used to study, do work, go to office hours, or just hang out.
- Teammates are a huge help. I know this as a fact. I have a group of teammates who are all mechanical engineering majors who spend so much time doing work together as a group. Having teammates is great because you can always ask them questions, check homework sets, and work together to get your work done.
- History shows it can be done. I know on our team specifically we have over a 3.0 GPA, have people participating in the undergraduate engineering program, double majoring, doing undergraduate research, working on campus, being TAs and workshop leaders, and participating in clubs and intramural sports. Really, you will find that you can handle sports and school and so much more with the amount of time and support you have at the university.
A brief update on our season as well: We're now 8-1-1 and just won our first game of the UAA campaign 3-0 against NYU. We are looking forward to keeping our seven-game unbeaten streak as we travel to Boston this weekend to play #12 Brandeis, which will be a really good test for us. You can read more about the NYU game as well as our upcoming match on the Athletics page.