Sheamus Dalton
Normally, I approach my sports column with an inspired opinion that I want to argue. I make it my goal to convince you all that my opinion is supreme and that it should become the overbearing opinion of our student body. While I may not always achieve my high aspirations, it is always the effect I want my writing to have on all my readers.
However, this week has been different. I was not looking forward to crafting my column into a genius piece of sports journalism as I normally do. I didn’t even have an idea solidified. As I sat down to write this column, I was still searching for the opinion that would inspire me, but nothing came. I was stuck in a stand still; writer’s block had a firm grip on my mind. I was instead distracted, thinking about all the other work I planned to do that night. Fifty pages of reading, outlining a paper and journal entries were all still on the agenda as the clock neared 10 p.m.
I decided to take a break, free my mind of stress and brew another pot of coffee. I desperately hoped that a caffeine boost would feed my brain insightful opinions and compel me to write my column speedily. While the coffee I made was lacking the opinionated caffeine I had hoped for, it nevertheless served as the inspiration I needed to write this column.
As I sipped my coffee and loathed myself for the amount of work that remained for that night, I realized how often I was in similar situations. I cringed when I thought about how it was rather normal for me to have massive amounts of work all piled up for the midnight hours. However, I also realized that I was going to have a late night because, like most nights, the hours after 10 p.m. served as my only time to do homework. Laziness and procrastination were not the reasons why I still had such a large workload.
My schedule as a student athlete left me no time for homework. Five and a half hours dedicated to class and three hours dedicated to practice had dominated my day, as they did for the majority of my week. Even on the weekends, my Saturdays were consistently consumed by games, leaving Sunday as my sole free day to rest and recover from the week. My athletic and academic schedules rarely coincided smoothly. There just simply are never enough hours in the day. Soreness of the body and the mind constantly plague my days.
This argument makes Div. III college athletics sound like they aren’t worth the costs. Draining practices, difficult classes and no scholarship? It sounds awful, right? We athletes, though, still continue to play. We never seem to be well-rested, and we never have the time to get ahead on our work, but we will always be out giving our all on the practice field.
I find this to be overwhelmingly inspiring. The fact that our love of the game can overcome the fatigue and stress we feel as student athletes leaves me with a sense of pride that I hope we all share. We force our bodies and our minds to do incredible things so that we can continue to play the sport that we love.
Thusly, I want to commend my fellow student athletes for their hard work this year. I don’t intend this column to serve as a venue in which I may vent and whine about how student athletes have it harder than other students. All students have their obligations, their roadblocks that make for late nights during the week. What I do intend is to affirm the hard work student athletes do here at the College.
The expectations of both our academics and our athletics are equally high and the work we, as student athletes, put in to reach these demands is undoubtedly commendable.
