Personal Narrative: Division Two College Athletes

The debate over whether or not college athletes should be paid has really heated up over the past couple of years. Imagine you are a college athlete; your typical daily routine would consist of an early wake up, an early morning practice, classes and tutoring sessions, and another practice or workout. Oh yeah, you have to fit in time for 4-5 meals to maintain energy throughout such an exhausting day. Athletes have to follow this routine all year long making it impossible to obtain a job to earn money. All of this hard work and time leads to success on and off the field but it also leads to enormous profit for the NCAA.

Every year the size of players ascends and these abusers continue to get away with little to no punishment. Highly sought after high school recruits turn to these to put on size before their first season of college football and collegiate players use them to prep for their possible future in the NFL. Due to the lack of testing, the upside for student-athletes to juice has almost become greater than the latter. Particularly in high school, the chance of a player actually getting busted does not deter them from cheating and trying to pack on excessive amounts of muscle. Every year parents lose kids that have thought they needed steroids to get bigger or improve their image.

College athletes can put as many as 60 hours a week at games and practices (Majerol 15). This causes the athletes to put less of a focus on their school work to focus on their athletics. Many of the top athletes never even finish their degree after playing for four years (Cooper 12-13). College athletes are encouraged to sign up for easier classes. They attend “independent study courses” that involve very little work to pass the class (Neuhauser 11).

A true peak was being accepted to Texas State University. San Marcos was a college town, full of distractions, and was where someone in their early twenties can learn a lot about growing up. I joined the school’s polo team and thought more about the team than I did about school work. Unfortunately, being irresponsible and skipping classes caused me to fail out, which forced me to see what needed to be done next.

Transitioning to college from high school was tough especially being a student-athlete. As an football athlete in college half of my time was spent playing or preparing for football, the other half of my time is spent for academics. Student athletes are naturally at a disadvantage when it comes to academics as opposed to a regular full-time student due to the limited amount of time. I admit my time management skills at Rutgers was not the best which reflects why my grades were on the low in. As time went on my GPA started to improve because my time management skills matured.

The author then says personal achievement, hard work, and talents are major factors within a person’s life. But that information does not play apart in everyone’s life. While I was reading the book I saw that the Czech Republic soccer team, there are no players born in later months. And from that you can say the younger players have been pushed out of the sport since the cut off age was in the start of the year. The author believes that many schools and sport teams should divided based on the month they were born so the students can compete with other children that are the same age.

But on the day of the semi-finals, my soccer team had a big problem. Due to summer vacations, we were missing a third of our team which left us with only enough kids to play. We didn’t have any subs. It was going to be a tough and hot eighty minutes of running with only a quick half-time break.

I played soccer sophomore and junior year in high school. My sophomore year was actually the first year I played soccer in a official team that I had to try out. But actually, my junior year I was chosen as a team captain and as a team captain I had to lead practice, starting with warm ups and stretches to leading them on the field and yelling my lungs out. Sometimes practice was rough to the point the girls wanted to give up but I always motivated them to do better and try their hardest because at the end of the day you were only cheating yourself or benefiting yourself. When my coach had to leave early for work, instead of finishing practice early, I continued to lead practice even if it meant taking the huge bag of balls home with me and

This was my first year on a varsity team and only my second year playing soccer competitively, so joining the team was especially daunting. But, outside of practice hours (4-5 days per week for 2-3 hours), I practiced at the park and trained with my cousin, who played soccer in college, to improve my skills. I even played in the house, which my mother did not appreciate. But, I genuinely wanted to get better and pull my weight and be part of the team. The team gave me a sense of community and pushed me to persevere in the face of adversity.

Six years of pee wee, four years of travel, roughly 10,000 dollars of my parents hard earned money spent in payments, numerous nights of practice, countless days consumed by games and I did not make the team. An entire summer of early mornings dedicated to workouts, and I did not make the team. My freshman year I tried out for the Brentwood High School soccer team and didn’t make the cut. I will never forgot waiting anxiously for that email, opening it and not seeing my name on that roster. I was devastated, embarrassed and simply sad.

It was after that season that I realized, that through the first 3 years of my high school soccer career, I had been trying to please someone and I wasn’t focused on enjoying what was in front of me. I had wanted those seasons to end so I could be done with the humility of playing on junior varsity, but now there isn’t much time left. I have only one more season left before my competitive sports career is over. This last season won’t be about pleasing my coach, it will be about enjoying the final ride with my teammates and friends that I have grown up playing with since the age of 7. Sometimes in life, you don’t appreciate stuff until it’s gone and luckily my failures helped me realize that my time playing soccer is about to be gone and I want to be able to enjoy

It was hard for me to do that for the first two months I would be missing lots of class due to all the soccer games we would travel to and not having lots of spare time for me to do homework since we would practice every day and that would take lots of time out of my day. Also my GPA is something I should have kept up with more I learned that it is better off to start off as a freshman with a high GPA and maintain it than to try to bring up a low GPA. Once I add more classes to my GPA average it will either go up or down in small increments. So it is better if I end first semester with a high GPA.

I work my butt off all year. In the off season I worked out almost every day, and during the season I push myself as hard as I can in practice to become better. To be honest, it can suck and I felt like quitting after my sophomore year, but I reminded myself how much it meant to me. I thought about how much my life revolved around football, and how much my parents wanted to watch me play. I can tell you now, that I feel completely stupid for even thinking about quitting.

I don’t know if my other family have been a such important position of leadership but I did and I succeeded in it. I always thought I really didn’t stand out in much throughout my life. I would join clubs and sports starting from age seven. It wasn’t until I was about age 14 when I started to wander off into what would be my true best experience playing soccer for a first division community soccer team named Club Atletico Boca Jrs.

Before anyone ever cared where I would play soccer, I was a 16 year old kid from Burnaby hoping to make it big. I have had the opportunity to have been coached by people who have been able to play soccer professionally. Many people have scrutinized me as a hardworking kid with ambitions to be the best, while others have viewed me as an individual who would never make it to the top due to the lack of talent I had. I was cut from teams, looked down upon, and I almost gave up. After making it up to the BCSPL division, I was part of a team which had many provincial players and ex-whitecaps.