preview

Student Athlete Discussion Essay

Good Essays

This fall when everyone goes back to school for the 2017-2018 school year, there will be about 480,000 college freshmen student athletes starting as well. Coming from high school to college and learning to balance their athletics and academics will become more difficult. The NCAA has a twenty-hour limit for athletic-related activities, but the typical Pac-12 athlete spends around twenty-one hours on such activities. They also spend an additional twenty-nine hours on “other athletic-related activities and receiving treatment and traveling for competitions” (Toporek), but this isn’t part of the NCAA limit. With all the time spent on sports, when does the student part in a student athlete come to play? Student is put in front of athlete for a reason, but it’s not always treated as if it is. When coming into college as a student athlete, there are certain requirements that the athlete is supposed to follow but don’t always really follow. A D1 athlete is supposed …show more content…

When the students were asked about how being involved in sports affected their academic performance, they answered to being “too exhausted to study effectively, that they are unable to devote enough time to both their academics and tests, and that athletic stress negatively impacts their academic focus” (Toporek). Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter testified two years ago in a National Labor Relations Board hearing about having to log fifty to sixty hour long weeks during training camps. This commitment prevented him from being able to attend medical school or studying abroad. Athletes are also finding it hard to get an adequate amount of sleep due to the lengthy hours of practices, games, camps, etc. Seventy-one percent of students said sleep is the main thing athletics has taken away from them, fifty-one percent of those people said that if they had an extra hour to do anything, it’d be dedicated to

Get Access