So my dream is to get into dental school and become a dentist. However, I also love playing soccer and have been playing for the last 13 years of my life. I also have an older cousin who was in pre-dental and she studied a ton for dental school. My mom said that I need to be at the top of my pre-dental program if I wanted to go to dental school and that it would be near impossible while playing a sport simultaneously. So my question is, anyone taking a pre-professional course while playing a sport, how do you handle it? I’ve heard playing a college sport is like a part-time job, but this is a d3 school where the athletics, if anything, are below average. I just want an estimate if it’s a good idea to try and continue with a sport in college or not.
My daughter’s very good friend played D3 soccer all through college while getting her biology degree. She is now a second year med student! She had a 4.0 through college. She was smart but not a genius by any means. She felt it was very doable, just had to come up with a study plan and stick to it.
My daughter played for a D3 program all 4 years. She had plenty of teammates who were premed and are going to med school. Might be harder in a D1 program where the sports demand more time commitment, but as long as you can time manage, it should not be an issue for a D3 program. In fact, many student athletes go D3 even though they are D1 level athletes precisely because they want a better balance of academics and athletics. They will also likely have a bigger impact for their team and have a starting position all 4 years.
It’s absolutely doable. You will need to be disciplined in your time management. Many athletes find that the structure their sport provides is helpful, especially when they are used to that. Without a sport, you have a lot of free time, and it’s also easy to fill it up with non-academic pursuits.
When you visit schools and meet with prospective teammates, ask about whether they have issues taking classes with labs, missing too many classes for travel, etc. It can vary by school, but most D3 schools are committed to balance.
My daughter played a D2 sport. She is an engineer and her roommate, who was also an All American, is now in dental school. They studied a lot. My daughter only worked (for a professor) her final semester and I don’t think her teammate worked at all (although a lot of them did). It was a tech school so almost everyone on the team was in engineering, business, or one of the sciences.
It’s really up to you if you can do it. At their arch rival school, a team that won the national championship, there were quite a few in nursing school and several in other sciences (it was a big bio school). They somehow arranged their schedules to get their clinics in in the fall and still graduate on time.
No question this is doable at most any D3 school.
As everyone above has said, playing a D3 sport while studying in a pre-professional program is absolutely do-able. Almost all D3 schools (and coaches) make the point that student athletes are students first and academics comes first, and the good ones actually live up to that idea. Once you are in the admissions/recruiting process, you will have the chance to meet with the coaches, and that should help to reassure your mom. If you are serious about playing D3 soccer, that probably means trying to get recruited, as you can’t really rely on being able to walk on in that kind of sport. There is a ton of information on CC about the recruiting process, including soccer in particular, so I recommend you take a look at those and also talk with your current coach. My son plays a different sport, but I recall that the soccer recruiting process, which is position-specific, starts pretty early. Another alternative to varsity soccer would be club soccer. At many schools, the club sports are also highly competitive.
Sometimes the team roster on the school’s athletics website will give player profiles including their majors. So you may be able to identify schools where the athletes in your sport include STEM majors or other time-consuming academics.
NCAA site provides data showing average time commitments in and out of season and how they vary by division.
Daughter played D3 soccer all 4 years and both she and her co-captain are now in med school (along with at least one other teammate). So yeah, doable. It was definitely like a part-time job - it’s a pretty successful program - but it definitely helped her hone her time-management skills and her college sports experience came up at more than half of her med school interviews. Lots of good observations and advice from other parents in this thread.
I just want to add that speaking to the coach is really important. Difference coaches handle this differently, even at the same school. My husband and I went to the same D3 school and each played a sport. His coach hassled him over labs which sometimes ran into practice timing, my coach never hassled any of us and planned practices so that we were not rushed getting to practice. So coach perspective matters an awful lot for this question.
Agree with this. There are D3 coaches who won’t recruit student athletes who intend on majoring in certain subjects…such as lab science, engineering, and nursing. It is not common, but it certainly happens.
Agree with @one1ofeach. Also, some schools do not hold class in the late afternoon, reducing the class/practice conflict, so that can be something to research at schools of interest.
Not only will it depend on the coach, it also depends on the sport. Swimming coaches personalize workouts and it’s not hard to show up late or even outside of team practice to knock out your yardage. A water polo player, however, probably can’t practice alone.
With that said, @Midwestmomofboys is right – many D3 have blocks of time in the afternoon when no classes are scheduled so that this won’t be an issue.