Schools all around the country are filled with phenomenal students and athletes. It is difficult to perform on your team when you’re overwhelmed with loads of homework. Completing school work becomes less manageable when your schedule is filled with sports practices.

When your brain is filled with excitement for after school activities, it makes it hard to focus on schoolwork. School starts to pile up and become difficult, even though athletes are supposed to put school first. It makes it hard to place education as a first priority when you have multiple sports practices to attend.

After practice, you become exhausted and homework is the last thing on my mind. The workload slowly piles up and becomes more difficult to finish as the week drags on.

Teachers assign assignment after assignment and the occasional test or quiz. School starts to become, memorize everything as fast as you can, know it for tomorrow and forget it later that night. This cycle drags on until the first breath of summer. I think the reason teachers do this is because they have so much content to cover is such little time. The state requires certain topics to be covered, not realizing some classrooms need more time to understand the subject. It’s the thrill and excitement of sports that keeps the student athlete dream alive for me. The joy of achievement pushes me to continue throughout the week and work hard.

The recruiting process adds stress to players who plan to continue their sports career in college.

Student athletes could even be monitored by college coaches beginning in 7th grade. Coaches begin to build profiles even if they are somewhat interested. There are hundreds of college coaches throughout the United States, and with all the attention provided from the colleges players feel obligated to add unnecessary stress on themselves.

Stress can be managed in many ways. For starters don’t make your sport the only part of your life. “Although it is very important to focus on your sport, your sport isn’t everything” (Dealing with stress as a college athlete).

Sleep is also super important, although it’s hard to maintain a good sleep schedule it is crucial to living a healthy life. Typically I get about 6-7 hours of sleep per night and a normal teenager needs about 8-10 hours. So yeah I’m a little tired each day.

The life is slowly pulled out of me as the week continues. When the weekend hits, instead of hanging out with friends and family as well as relaxing, the weekend becomes to be how much sleep can I get. Or sometimes it seems to be, how much school work can I get caught up on.

Obviously,  I’m doing more than I can handle so maybe the only solution is to purely, just cut back.

However it’s the thrill and excitement of sports that keeps the student athlete dream alive for me. The joy of achievement pushes me to continue throughout the week and work hard.

Athletics and education teach others how to properly budget your time. Life gets difficult when you have no extra time to participate in other activities. Through persistence and dedication work gets done and everything falls back into place. It is sometimes stressful but even with all the stress, I wouldn’t change my decision to play sports for the world.