Being an athlete, keeping up with schoolwork, and having a social life all at once is not easy. However, if you are the only athlete in your family, your loved ones just may not be able to understand.
When you are headed to college, and you are the only one in your family who is going to play a sport while you are there, there are a few things you should know.
5 Things that Happen to a Player Who’s the Only College Bound Athlete in a Family
Here are five things that will happen to you when you are the only college athlete in your family.
1. No one understands how much you have to work out.
People will look at you and see that you are in good shape. But they will have trouble understanding the amount of work that you do to get into it.
“It’s not work if you love the sport, right? So stop complaining about how doing something you love is hard. You aren’t the one having to work at things you don’t love.”
But you will know the truth. It doesn’t matter how much you love field hockey, getting up at five in the morning to do conditioning is not as fun as it sounds. Working out hours a day just to be in tip-top shape to go out there and be yelled at by your coach because you didn’t play perfectly is tough.
In fact, a few years ago, a report discussed in USA Today showed that being a college athlete may be a fulltime job.
Yes. If you really love playing, it will be worth it. But it would be nice if you could get other people to understand just how tough it is.
2. You get no sympathy when you talk about how hard it is to find time to study.
Similar to the point above, you are going to be doing a lot of work. And yet, somehow you still have to study in order to make good grades.
Yet when you complain about how hard it is, people just will not understand. “Yeah, yeah. You don’t have a lot of time to study because you are traveling all over and playing your favorite sport. Besides, don’t schools just give good grades to the athletes? Do you even have to study?”
You know the answer is yes. Even if your school does just give out good grades, which is rarer than people think, how does that help you? You still need to learn the skills that are going to help you in real life and even in a professional sports career. You want to pass your classes because of your own intelligence.
Yet finding time to do this is hard work, even if no one else understands that.
3. People do not understand that road trips aren’t vacations.
Wow! You get to travel all over the country on road trips. Everybody should be jealous of you. Right?
To a lot of people, you seem to be living the dream life. However, you know that between games, practices, and strict curfews, you are not out there doing much sightseeing. In fact, you may not get to see anything but a field, court, or track.
While you will get to stay in a lot of hotels, there is a chance that you will not really ever be able to leave those hotels unless you are going on a team trip, and most of these “trips” will be riding to a practice or game. Maybe you’ll be able to see touristy spots as you drive by them, though.
4. Everything revolves around you during the season.
Here is where your siblings will get a little bit jealous. Your family will likely be your biggest fans. And if you have a game, they are going to make a point to show up at the game no matter where it is or how far away.
During your season, vacation days and gas money will likely all go towards making it to tournaments and games in order to cheer you on. Revel in the attention. It is one of the good ones.
5. No. You do not have time to come home and visit.
Everything seems to come back to the fact that nobody knows how hard being a college athlete really is. And because they don’t understand it, they might not get why you can’t take a couple of days off from practice in order to come home and visit.
They might not understand, but that doesn’t make it easy. You aren’t ignoring them or putting them off. You really just don’t have much free time at all.
Recruiting Family Players
If you really love your sport and want to go far with it, then you are going to enjoy playing in college. However, that does not change the fact that it is hard work and many people will not understand that.
If you really want to get your family to understand what you are going through, there is one big thing you can do. Get someone else to go to college and play a sport. It does not have to be the sport that you play, just any sport will do.
They will be able to go back and report to everyone else. They’ll tell everyone you know that you were not lying. Being a college athlete really is tough.
