As athletes, we come in to college, bright-eyed and bushy tailed. We have been playing our sports for fun during the last 15 years of our lives and now it's time to finally cash in. We have been preparing for these next four years our entire lives and we are ready, or so we thought.
But here is the thing they never tell you about college sports. The moment you sign your NLI, your life is not longer yours. What you eat, what you do in your spare time, how you spend your summers, how you spend your weekends, how much you sleep, how much time you spend on schoolwork, how often you see your family, the choice is no longer yours. For the next four years, you are making a commitment to be sold out, all in, for your teammates and the goals you have set for yourselves. Every choice you make has repercussions, for not only you, but the people you choose to battle with. So from here on out, you are a machine.
A machine that functions all year around for four years straight; you need to get fit in the off season, perform during season, recover and maintain during post-season. There is no time to be injured, have an off day, or take a break.
Your priorities are to be the best at your sport, maintain a competitive GPA in order to get into your program at your dream graduate school, have a somewhat normal social life, and eat and sleep at regular intervals. But you are you, so for sure you can do it all. And being a student athlete, you are probably goal driven, which leads you to organize your life into these categories. Everything you do in a day is designed to fit into its category, making you better in that area of life, and help you get that competitive edge.
Feel stressed out yet?
These are thoughts that go through a student athlete's head on a daily basis, and we wonder why so many athletes struggle with depression, anxiety, or eating disorders. We constantly strive for perfection, one day, one workout, one choice, at a time. We constantly measure ourselves, whether that is our weight or how much weight we can lift, our caloric intake or our caloric burn. We see numbers that reflect what we do every day and eventually, it is pretty hard to not feel that these numbers somehow reflect who we are.
Yes, we are student athletes, but no, we are not machines. We push ourselves on a daily basis, bending as far as we can, and sometimes we break. Sometimes, we realize just how human we really are. Sometimes, we need to just step back and breathe.
As student athletes, we need to remember that our worth does not come from our record and what we can do is not who we are.
