Everyone glorifies what it’s like to be a collegiate athlete, getting to play the sport you love and do what you love doing with other people from potentially all over the world that love doing the same thing as you.
For me and my team, that’s playing soccer. We have girls from all over the United States, and even two girls from Canada that chose to make our school their home and continue their athletics and further their education.
But this is what they don’t tell you: it’s not always fun.
It gets very time consuming, and that’s not always fun. Missing classes constantly isn’t fun when you have to play catch up or take tests days in advance because your professor will not let you take them when you return from your trip. It’s not seeing your family for weeks or even months at a time because you are so busy and don’t have time to schedule a trip to go home. It’s long nights studying on the bus or quiet hours on the bus so others can do their homework. It’s being so overwhelmed that you want to crack and never move again but knowing that you can’t because you’re physically too busy to just sit still and try to gather your thoughts.
What they don’t tell you is that some of the injuries you will endure will be some of the biggest obstacles and mental blocks that you’ll ever deal with. My freshman year I was forced to have shoulder surgery if I wanted to stop living in pain, and here I am in my sophomore year living the same problem again, constantly living in pain and not knowing what do next.
What they don’t tell you is that fighting with your team is one of the worst feelings ever, especially when you want to tell them why you feel the way that you do, why you had that panic attack at practice, but don’t know who to reach out to or who you can trust with your emotions and feelings. Everyone wants to be there for you of course but you can never truly tell who wants to be there for you just to say that they know or who actually cares about your mental, physical, and emotional health. It’s just wanting to spend time by yourself to try and figure out what exactly you’re feeling and thinking but not wanting people to think you’re antisocial.
Lastly, they don’t tell you what it’s like when you’ve undoubtedly reached your breaking point and cannot stand the sight of your coach because he’s made you grow to hate the sport that got you through so much and that you fell back on when life was hard and it always picked you up. They don’t tell you that sometimes you’ll be happy to not be on long road trips and saddened every day that you step onto the field because you wonder what your coach could possibly yell at you next for.
No one tells you the downside of collegiate athletics. Granted the good should outweigh the bad, but the bad needs to have some light shed on it too.