Student Athletes Making the Grade

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Student-Athletes Making the Grade The term “student-athlete” has an admirable ring to it. Kids often dream about sporting the colors of their favorite team and competing at the Division 1 collegiate level. Unfortunately, there is so much more to being a student-athlete than what you see on the field or court. Behind the scenes of the impeccable plays fans witness, there are athletes struggling to maintain an acceptable GPA and remain on the desired path of graduation. It takes a substantial amount of time and effort for a student-athlete to be academically successful in college. Coaches push athletes past the allotted time constraints for practices significantly limiting study hours as well as the energy levels of the student-athletes. Time appears to be the biggest factor working against these student-athletes as they strive to prosper on and off the field. Most students have the typical schedule of 5 to 6 classes per week, totaling approximately 16 hours. Cumulatively, they have 168 hours in a week. Sixteen of these hours are spent in class and 152 hours remain for sleep, studying, and other activities of their choice. Logically, there appears to be more than enough time to spend on studies, which would make it easy to achieve adequate grades. However, student-athletes have an increasingly lower amount of available hours to spend on academics. For example, “The level of dedication and amount of time student-athletes put forth in order to participate in intercollegiate athletics equates to a full time job” (Root 286). The key words here are “full time job.” Non-student-athletes struggle to maintain passing grades when only working part-time jobs while attending college! School consumes half of their time and work consumes the other half. On the other hand, student-athletes must be committed to academics AND athletics full time. Student-athletes spend over 40

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