Is it hard for competitive Athletes to balance sports and Education
A lot has been written and said over the years about student athletes and how they balance their educations with their sports careers. It is a very difficult thing to do because if they do not maintain their grades in school then they will not make it to university where their sports careers can really take off. The hard part about it is that these young athletes also have to practice in their chosen sport while in high school and at times it can seem like there are not enough hours in the day to do it all.
This aspect of athletes and education is not limited to any particular sport either it can be seen in all the major sports all over the world. A South Korean figure skating champion got herself into some hot water recently when she failed two of her university courses. Kim Yu Na missed exams which led to her failing because of a heavy competition and training schedule. This example just shows how hard it is for athletes to compete in major competitions as well as completing their studies.
The problem with all this is that if an athlete neglects her or his education in pursuit of a sporting career and that sports dream fails, then they do not even have an education to fall back on. It seems parents have a big role to play in this situation. As parents, their job is to encourage all aspects of their children's educations and sports careers. But they sometimes fall short in this respect. Once a child shows strength in a sport they encourage that side while neglecting the academic side. If a parent encouraged both sides of a child's development then the child might excel at both. This is very hard though because once a child shows prowess in one field that is usually the field a parent encourages the most.
Being a university student-athlete is a tough job by every standard. A student-athlete has to fulfil academic requirements as well as practising for games and actually playing in games. Student-athletes have to go to classes in the mornings, sometimes get to practise before their first morning classes and also go to practise in the afternoons while sometimes taking night classes on top of it all. A student doing all this really does not have time left in the day to do anything else that a normal student gets to enjoy.
A lot of universities and even schools have started educational requirements for athletes. The requirements usually range from meeting a certain grade point average or attending a certain number of classes per semester. This has helped a lot of potentially great athletes to get a solid education and get into a top university where they can then pursue a sporting career. A lot of the time a coach can be a student-athlete's best friend in regards to getting the right grades. They help students to bring discipline into their study routine, find a mentor for them, set study goals and help them achieve the grades they need to in order to succeed in school and university. By prioritising their lives around studying and sports can really make a big difference in a student-athlete's outlook on getting the right sort of grades.
Apparently there is also a loophole that potential athletes can exploit in America in regards to getting the right sort of grades. Basically if a student-athlete does not have the right sort of grades to make it to college then they can intentionally fail their last year of high school and enrol into a preparatory school and then enter college that way. In this method test scores on the SATs are not counted for an athlete and they get a free pass essentially to college. This just shows that the system is not working and something needs to be done in order to get student-athletes on the right track because getting good grades will help them not only to get into college but throughout their lives.
Education is as important for a budding athlete as pursuing their sports career. They need to understand this and if they do then a lot of intelligent and talented young sports people will be produced in the coming years.
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