Of course, it’s not every sport, and it’s not all year round, but even for those playing less prestigious sports at small LACs, in regional conferences, it means a lot of time on buses traveling to play away games. It’s a huge time commitment.
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UAA, I’m looking at you!
The continent spanning conferences now mean that more college sports teams get to experience travel times like what University of Hawaii has.
Posted on a day that my daughter is missing class to travel to an out of state sports competition…Fortunately, she only has to do this a few times each semester and not every week.
I was at my kiddo’s LAC for Parent’s Weekend last month and he talked to me about how several of his fellow 2nd year friends are considering dropping their sport because the 6 day a week commitment and travel makes their classes so hard, and their ability to do anything other than their sport (e.g. a club, activity, a weekend hike) is impossible.
While he sometimes grumbles a bit about how club sports gets next to no funding, he’s glad he gets to do his sport without it running his life to the degree that the varsity athletes contend with.
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I totally dont understand how kids at LACs manage this. The workload is intense !
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My D1 son just came off a tough 3 game stretch, but he never changed time zones.
They traveled by plane on a Monday for a Tuesday night game. They flew back Wednesday morning and he went to class Thursday. He has no classes on Fridays. They then played a game Saturday night. On Monday he went to class. Tuesday they took a 7 hour bus ride, they played Wednesday night and then did the return 7 hour bus ride on Thursday. He attended class 2 days out of 2 weeks. He missed labs and tests that he has managed to make up. It’s not easy.
What surprised me in the article is that athletes at Stanford don’t get to register for classes before everyone else. That is literally one of the best perks of being an athlete. My son registered for the spring semester this morning at 7:30 with all of the other athletes. He got every first choice class at the times he needed.
Last year his team made the NCAA tournament. We had a plane ticket for him to come home for Thanksgiving. Instead, on Thanksgiving day, he was on a plane headed to California. The team owns him from late July until late November at the earliest. Honestly, he loves every minute of it, despite the grind.
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From the article:
“When Stanford recruits an athlete, we tell them you can do anything — any major, any sport, anything socially,” said Hunter Hollenbeck, a senior on the diving team and the president of Stanford’s student-athlete advisory council. “But being an athlete now, it’s getting harder to preach that you can do anything. We’re coming to terms that athletics are taking much more time than we’re used to.”
Well, there you have it for all those who said that Stanford team travel wasn’t going to be impacted with the conference move.
“It’s hard for me to imagine it’s not going to have an adverse impact given all the travel and the missing of classes, despite the best efforts to minimize travel,” said Mark Brilliant, a history professor at U.C.-Berkeley and a member of the school’s Faculty Athletic Council. “At a certain point, the student-athlete concept — or conceit — gets so stretched that it’s broken.”
In some sports at some schools, it was already ‘broken.’ I hope NYT updates this article after the M/W basketball, baseball, and softball seasons.
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Looks like the sport season overlaps with only the fall semester, so he gets the spring semester without the large amount of travel time. Seems like an athlete serious about academics will try to load the more difficult and more time consuming courses in the semesters where the sport is not in season. Of course, that can be difficult if the sport season overlaps both fall and spring semesters.
A small number of colleges use the quarter system, which can overlap sport seasons in different ways. Semester versus quarter system and the amount of overlap with sport seasons can matter to an athlete serious about academics.
Not unique to LACs. Indeed, many LACs are in more regional conferences, so their travel times may be less than those of schools in more spread-out conferences.
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There are ‘hidden’ seasons in many sports though. Examples: Spring football. Fall baseball. College golf is both fall and spring. XCT&F is all year, for athletes that participate in XC, indoor and outdoor seasons.
Even in D3, my baseball player had athletic commitments 30 hours per week in the offseason, and counting travel was over 40 hours per week for spring season and part of fall during the period they had fall ball games.
Oh, he has a spring season as well, but the commitment is reduced in accordance with NCAA requirements. There are also off season “optional” workouts and other “optional” activities.
That said, yes, if available in the spring my son takes his most difficult classes then.
Same for my Ivy League athlete. But at least the travel isn’t as bad as at Stanford, which is now part of the ACC.
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Also, at least in our experience with two sports, the class day and practice schedules are such that there is minimal conflict. The Stanford athlete we know was told to take a “reduced load” in season and take classes in the summer quarter instead.
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Thankful my D is in the ODAC. Longest drive is 3 hours - hasn’t had to miss a single class all season.
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This is in active discussion now - I would be surprised if it isn’t changed by next year. There isn’t any public pushback, at least according to the newspaper.
The ACC move is hitting some sports harder than others - there is going to be some real impact.
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Being in two travel club sports, my S24 is going into his third weekend in a row of travel tournaments, and apparently has six practices a week (which is missing one for one club sport because it conflicts with the other).
It does seem like a lot, but so far classes seem to be going well. He is being very diligent about looking ahead and staying ahead of assignments and studying. We have also been discussing course load and using the fact you do actually have four years to complete your major requirements and such.
And this is just club sports (albeit travel, and the highest level of the sports offered at his college, with national tournament ambitions).
That said, anecdotally at least, it seems the varsity athletes we know who are playing for UAAs, NESCACs, and so on have been making it work so far as well. There does seem to be a lot of effort put into minimizing actual missed classes and such.
But I also know various people who ended up quitting their sports eventually due to feeling it was asking too much, or made it impossible to do what they wanted academically, or so on.
I think in many ways having such obligations is helpful. Classroom time in college is much reduced and there is the illusion of free time. My kids definitely benefitted from the structure their athletic commitments provided. It doesn’t have to be sports. A job can have much of the same effect.
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My son was a rower at a D3 school. Luckily for him, most of their regular competitors were within a few hour drive and they only competed on the weekend (sometimes needing to miss Friday or Thursday night to get somewhere and prep pre-regatta). But his school is on a 7 week quarters system, and most classes meet four times a week. Missing a day or two at that pace was really hard. But even more than that, the reason he stopped rowing is that he felt it took his whole life. There’s a fall and spring season, and it took 4-5 hours a day during the week and all day on Saturday. He felt like he missed out on the fun things about being a college student. He loved the team and the guys, but I think there was just some burnout.
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Between getting paid to play and missing class to travel across the country for athletic commitments, when does the whole concept of student athlete disappear at D1 schools?
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