Wake up, class, workouts, and homework. With breakfast, lunch and dinner at some point between all that, hopefully. Add in the actual sport event and you have one very busy student! That’s the life of a typical student-athlete. ’You’ve heard from me before about being a student-athlete, this time around I’m going to focus on the time in their life when they aren’t a student or an athlete. That little bit of time during their day where they can just relax and kick back for maybe as little as an hour a day.

Obviously, sports vary as to how much conditioning and practice their sport and coaches require.  For instance swimmers have to wake up some mornings at 5 a.m. to make it to their morning practice. Softball they have morning practice and conditioning at 6 a.m., as well. Soccer has night practices on Fridays, along with during the day or morning practices. Some coaches schedule practices at certain times for different reasons. One reason may be punishment or a consequence of poor performance, or maybe to keep them out of trouble, or maybe even the simple fact of that it’s the only time the whole team can get together for practice.

I’m a golfer and some people think it’s not much of a sport or that we have it way to easy, neither of which is true. It’s a sport in a lot of ways. You try walking up and down hills in freezing cold or extreme heat, windy, rainy and even snowy conditions, all with your clubs on your back! Golf is a mentally and physically exhausting sport, just like football is or soccer. We don’t do a lot of conditioning, but we practice everyday for two plus hours and that’s conditioning in itself for us golfers. We work at both the physical skill of the game and the mental part of the game.

I was talking to a volleyball player today in class, and when I miss class, she gives me her notes, and when she misses class, I give her my notes. It works out perfectly! All until we both miss the same day. I was telling her in four days of our Monday-Wednesday-Friday class (Monday to Monday) I’d miss three of the four! She was in complete shock that golf misses so much class time! So the people who say “yeah, we practice for an hour and a half everyday and then have conditioning three times a week,” I say to you, “we have golf practice every single day for two plus hours and we also miss twice as much class as you.” With all the class time missed, leads me to this, no free time! When do we get our free time? Since golfers miss so much class that means make-up work. How do we even have time for relaxation? Golfers actually don’t have a lot of down time. Our down time is when we go to sleep.

“I go to bed everyday around 1:00am if not 2:00am in the morning, going to bed at 11:00pm is early for me, so I don’t have much free time, if I do I’ll nap.” said Shelby who’s a freshman on the woman’s golf team.

Each and every person is different with how much homework they have and how much time they devote to it. So some people, even though they are participating in the same sport,  might find a way to eek out some time for fun. For example, Kelyn, Austey and Collin, are freshmen on the men’s golf team, usually get together almost every evening and play a couple games of basketball in the HPER with their roommates. They make time to escape from school and golf.

***

Basketball isn’t in season right now but they do have conditioning almost everyday. Steven Husk is a transfer Senior on the men’s basketball team, although he has more free time now than he would during basketball season he still is a busy guy with school, conditioning and work. When he wants to get away from everything he watches “a lot of Netflix and sports” Steven said sitting on the couch trying to think of everything he needs to do in his down time. “Lately I’ve been watching the FIBA World Cup Qualifiers on TV, so basically I either watch a lot of TV, or go out with friends” he said. He also sits on his phone a lot, checking Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and playing a game called Clash of Clans.

Ashley, who is a former volleyball player, but current student says, “well obviously this time of the year, any year, its Big Brother time.” Which means every Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday she’s watching Big Brother on TV. She spends a good chunk of time on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well.

It seems to me that the common thing for student-athletes to do to get away from everything is to watch TV or browse the Internet and hangout with friends and roommates.  Not very exciting or productive, but a great mental escape in the small bits of spare time that come up.