When you sign up to play a sport in college, you sign up for the practices, the games, the cool gear, and the new coach and teammates you’ll have. As with anything, there’s more you have to figure out on the fly.
Every first-year comes in aiming for trifecta: great grades, great athletics, and a great social life, the feasibility of which is nil without good time management. But why not shoot for the moon? The thing is, there are only 168 hours in a week, and classes are intellectually challenging while practices are physically demanding. School gets tough quick: it isn’t even necessarily that you’ll have one hard class; it’s more so the fact that you’ll be taking Differential Equations alongside Statics (formerly Mechanics of Solids) right next to Physics, and have fifty pages to read for your chosen humanities course. Of course, there’s a different learning curve for everyone, but the high school “I’ll study the night before and be fine” ethos does not often bode well at the college level, especially for athletes with a need to rest before the next day’s practices and classes.
Even with the course load, one thing that might be surprising is that, at least in my experience at Stevens, coaches actually care about your academics. Being a Division 3 school, there’s the unspoken reality that your athletic career will probably end after these four years, while your professional career will only take off at that point. What that means is the real investment is in the classroom. That being said, it doesn’t mean you’re going to train less, have a smaller commitment to athletics, or get away with skipping practice. You’re still looking at some 15-20 hours a week spent practicing and training in the varsity gym, not including games or meets and the travel time it takes to get to wherever you’re headed.
It’s easy to underestimate the amount of sacrifice required to play a sport in college before you get there, especially when a majority of it comes in the quiet form of staying in rather than hanging out with friends so that you can sleep early for morning practice, and coming back early or forgoing holiday breaks altogether since you have to stay on campus to train or compete. Is the sacrifice worth it? The answer differs from year to year and athlete to athlete, but the support network you get as a first-year athlete is huge and can make a big difference in your college experience in the short and long run.
If I had to fill in the blank of “I wish I knew xyz before choosing to play a sport in college,” there are a lot of great fillers that would do justice. I wish I knew the importance of a good sleep schedule. I wish I knew how influential my team’s support network was to my success as a first-year. I wish I knew how many friends I’d make. I wish I knew that there would be great practices just as much as awful ones. And lastly, I wish I knew that it meant achievements my younger self would not have thought possible.
