After the countless amount of hours put in, sweat dripped out and pain withheld I can finally say my student athlete career is coming to an end, and I don’t regret any of it.
In life, there is always going to be one moment, one experience you wish you could just go back and re-do it.
Choosing to be a collegiate student-athlete is not one of those moments.
I don’t regret a single thing about my choice in being a student athlete, especially in college. People said not to do it, “It’s a whole new level, and it’s going to be so hard.”
Everyone has had days where they just wanted to walk away from their sport and never come back; they thought their career was done. But, they get right back up and do it all again the following day. The same schedule, the same routine; wake up, go to practice, go to class, go back to practice, and somewhere in between eat three meals a day. Being a collegiate athlete is hard.
It’s mentally and physically draining. After a long day there’s nothing better than going to bed, just to wake up, what feels like only closing your eyes for a few minutes, to hear your alarm at 5 am.
I remember the first day of my first preseason my freshman year. All I could think was, “What the hell am I getting myself into..”
Meanwhile, my coach at the time had a daughter who he coached for the Olympic open water swim team.
I knew from that point on, nothing was going to be easy. I dealt with the pressure and the stress of not thinking I was good enough. As the season went on, I figured things out. I became comfortable and confident with where I was as an athlete. I was making so much progress and as a freshman that’s pretty big; then I realized that my decision to become an athlete in college was the best decision I’ve ever made.
People say being an athlete is no different than being a regular student, but those people couldn’t be more wrong. With being an athlete, you gain a new community no matter what sport you play. You have a group of people, a team, a family; who go through the same thing that you do; the pain, the frustration, the whole nine yards. They get it.
But not just your team, every athlete gets it.
While coming into college and having instant friends and a new community was a great advantage, I also gained many life lessons and skills.
Time management and being organized are definitely top of the list. There’s no time to put things off especially with class, practice and work. When you get an assignment you do it, because if you even fall behind in the slightest then you’re instantly drowning, and it’s very hard to recover from it.
Learning how to juggle things was pretty hard, but after awhile I got it down.
Being on a team also taught me the importance of working together along side with great communication skills. Everyone knows since day one “there’s no I in team”. Being on one team with two separate sports is kind of difficult. At my school I am on the swimming & diving team. I dive, while the other 35 members are swimmers.
Sometimes communication wasn’t always easy. They swim countless amounts of yards and I’m jumping off a board. Sometimes we butt heads, but we just have to remember in the end it’s the same team, with the same goal.
My coach always said, “Having one or two fast swimmers is nothing if your team has depth.”
Working together to reach one common goal can get pretty hard. Everyone is different. They have been brought up and raised differently, being able to mesh well with people despite their differences is an amazing skill to have not only for the purpose of keeping peace within the team, but for the future.
Being a student athlete, people tend to hold you to a higher standard. That standard pushed not only me but also many athletes at my school to excel and succeed in the classroom.
There’s this stereotype that goes around about how athletes are supposed to be dumb, or they’re not the brightest crayon in the box, but that’s not the case, at all. At my school you have to have at least a 2.0 GPA to be eligible to play your sport. I can honestly say, if I didn’t play a sport my grades would not be what they are.
Although what it felt like the negatives outweighed the positives, I could not be more happy with my decision to continue to be an athlete through my college career.
