I think there is some hyperbole here. My Ivy athlete practices on average 2 hours a day, maybe 3 if a lift day.
It’s honestly not that different from my son’s HS/Club commitment. I’m not going to add in her entire (very fun, fully funded, with career panels and mentorship opportunities) training trip into this calculation. Yes, they travel for games. So what? They do HW on the bus.
and there are plenty of non-D1 athletes who lift 2-3/wk or run hills/intervals, or…
No hyperbole from me, but certainly there can be differences by sport and by school. You can see the average hours that athletes reported above, from the latest NCAA Goals study.
For any of the sports it’s pretty easy to do the math. Baseball time commitment is high because the number of games played per year are high and games are long. They often play double headers to cut down on travel time…even sometimes during weekdays (so noon start time/lots of missed classes). Obviously no one is holding schools to the NCAA stated daily and weekly time limits.
Lastly, there are plenty of people who can’t read/study on busses…e.g., motion sickness and/or rowdy-not-conducive-to-studying atmosphere.
I agree the time commitment is not that high and often includes things that kids would be doing anyway like eating, watching film (of themselves or their opponents - people who like sports often watch sports). In non-season, she had practice, study tables, team volunteer activities, meals, some scrimmages. During her season, I’d say she had practice for 2-3 hours per day unless there was a game then the game was 3 hours. Practice or play on the weekend for a few hours. Even the busiest of weeks, spring break with 4 games (always at home), it wasn’t 40 hours.
I don’t feel like she was an employee. If the students let athletics interfere with their academics, that’s on them. Athletes at most schools do quite well academically. My daughter’s coach knew if she skipped a class or did poorly on a test.
I feel like I am hearing mixed messages about college athletics. In thread after thread I have been assured that college athletes are sought by future employers not because of an Old Boys Network, but because athletics are the most demanding and time-consuming college activity such that being a varsity athlete proves the possession of an astounding work ethic and unmatched time management skills.
But now I’m hearing that the time commitment is just a couple hours a day, maybe 3, really no different than other clubs, consisting of a bunch of pretty ordinary things thing that a lot of other students do all on their own just for fun…
I mean which is it?
Its is 2-3 hours a day but EVERY SINGLE DAY. You don’t get to not show up if you are busy and have a test. Time management is huge. You have to work well with others. Maybe not “old boys” but its a type of commitment that people find easy to understand. Club sport as in travel team.
The point is that it doesn’t look any different than any high level athletic training with the bonus of no hours in the car to get to practice each day. Its far from “a full time job.”
Yes, there are teams who “own” you. They control what you eat, what classes you take, when you take them. And there are usually big scholarship $$$ involved. That is not how Ivy athletics works or is about.
During the season it is more than 3 hours a day, plus the weekend games, but in the off season it is much less. But it requires a lot of time management. An athlete can’t leave a project till the last minute because there might not be enough time to get it done if there is a road trip. My daughter was very organized. She had mandatory study tables her first semester and used those 8-10 hours a week to actually study. Do you count those 8 hours as ‘athletic’? I think they are academic. But scheduled.
And there is personal care that needs to be taken care of too, like eating right, working out, scheduling laundry time, and lots and lots of sleep. Again, not counting this as athletic time but if you want to, that’s fine. I know that as a college bum myself I did my projects at the last minute, often while doing laundry at midnight and eating junk food. My daughter didn’t have that option.
My son also estimates that he spends about 3 hours a day with workouts. As with your daughter, the personal care is a significant time commitment. Getting 8 hours of sleep a night takes time, but it is an essential part of training. During crunch time for projects, between workouts and sleeping he is probably spotting many of his classmates 6 hours a day.
He told me that he could be getting better grades if not for the sport, and that he could be doing better at the sport if he cared less about his studies. But he is comfortable with the tradeoffs that he has made, and is confident that he has been spending his time in college well.
It probably varies a smidge by sport and how competitive that team is in that sport. I think if you play women’s soccer at Williams, you’re tied down quite a bit. Rowing in any program that has expectations like being competitive at NCAAs and HOCR is incredibly demanding and you’re up at the crack of dawn out on the water or doing indoor workouts that are truly exhausting, and this is pretty much year-round. IDK, it seemed pretty demanding to me. But you’re right that other things can be equally demanding if the student chooses to pursue such other things as seriously. Maybe the difference with sports is that you don’t have a choice if you want to remain on the team.
Demanding, but not 40 hours a week unless you count every minute they are with the team - eating, studying, maybe riding on a bus. That’s when the time management comes in like studying while on the bus (hard for my daughter because of car sickness, but she figured it out), telling teammates and other friends “no, I have to go do laundry and study”. There can also be a culture of the team, and on daughter’s team she was a ‘study-er’ but so were a few other kids so she wasn’t the only one staying in to study or studying on road trips. I’d say about half were in engineering or a stem program, several in business, a couple in the psych program with a focus on autism. And yes, a few party animals.
If daughter wasn’t on the team, she still would have spent 2 hours a day working out. She does that now!
I just don’t think you have the visibility to be able to make such a broad statement. And the data say otherwise.
D1 baseball players report spending 42 hours per week on average on athletic related activities during the season, FBS football players 40 hours in the most recent NCAA goals study…are you saying that’s inaccurate? Of course the students should be including travel times in these estimates because the travel makes things even more grueling whether or not some can get some studying done during that time. It likely won’t be ideal study conditions or sleep conditions if that’s what they choose to do.
And it’s not just travel for games/matches/meets. Some teams have a 30 minute drive to their practice location everyday…so 60 minutes just gone out of their day to commute to/from practice. Just dead time really, unless one wants to count that as team bonding time.
I’m not saying they don’t work hard but that their 40 hours isn’t the same as going into the office for 40 hours per week or working construction for 40 hours. The 40 hours includes commuting and eating. My daughter didn’t include ‘commuting’ to the field house or the field or the gym, just like if she went to class 15 hours a week it wouldn’t include the walk there or having to jump on the cross campus bus.
How many of those 40 hours are spent on a practice field? How many are spent sleeping in a hotel or eating or doing the same things they’d be doing if they were in their dorm rooms (video games, watching movies, on their phones)? I didn’t include those in my daughter’s average of 3 hours per day off season or 30-40 in the busiest week in season (for her spring break week).
But if you include it all, I want credit for the 2 hours a day I used to commute to work, 1 hour for lunch, reading industry stuff on my own time…pretty much worked 80 hours a week and I want my union to recognize that.
You are changing what you are saying…I responded to the challenging of the number of hours that some athletes are spending each week on athletic activities by citing the anecdote of your D…which is different than the what actual broad based data show.
Regarding whether or not the student athletes are employees of the school, which would then allow the athletes to unionize…that will be decided by the courts (who are going to look at the data, among other things.)
Well those Dartmouth BB players aren’t ‘working’ at all right now, so would they be eligible for Union layoff benefits or unemployment? To cover that, those union dues are going to have to be pretty high.
I still say that no sport averages 40 hours per week for the whole school year or 52 weeks of the year. Some of the 40 hours would not be considered ‘work’ in a traditional job, even a union job (meal times, getting dressed for work, commuting, medical appointments) and the Dartmouth players want to be in a union based on their ‘working hours.’ I can see the coaches putting a time clock near the court/field and making all other activities optional if the workers expect to be paid for every minute.
Others have addressed the hours and the inflexibility of the hours relative to most clubs. But the other thing is that employers know that the time commitment is real. People can easily exaggerate how much time they spend volunteering, being in the whatever club, etc., and often it is impossible to know how real any of it is.
Lots of Auburn fans are asking that now.