years (athletically, academically, and even financially) to help with your training and your studies. They may also be the type of parents who exerted pressure on you to perform. And, even if they don’t directly exert any pressure, the perception of such is likely there. If you need clarification on this point, just imagine what would happen if you failed two classes one semester, lost your scholarship, and got kicked off your team. How would you tell your parents (or grandparents or guardians)? How hard would that be? How disappointed would they be?
2. Your friends (who are not teammates): Your core social group, your high school group of friends, will love you no matter what, but you’ve likely built your image and your “self” around being a star athlete, and now a student-athlete, so that expectation is there. You’ll feel the pressure here if anything starts to slip . . .
3. Your college coach: You were likely comfortable with your high school or club coach as you developed, but now you’re in college. Your coach likely recruited you, selected you over others, and helped you get that amazing scholarship. But now put yourself in your coach’s shoes. College coaches are fired often; turnover is frequent and the pressure on them to win is extremely high. This pressure is transferred to the athletes (you), who often feel a need and a pressure to perform “for their coach.”
4. Your college teammates: Again, back home, in high school or club, you were likely with your buddies or boy/girlfriends. Now, you’re with a bunch of teammates, some older than you, some competing with you, some who may rely on you for their success or who may hope you fail so they can play more. Some teammates will probably become lifelong friends and may even have the same academic major as you. Other teammates may not; they may be rivals or live a completely different life (in a different academic program). Whether friend (counting on you) or foe (wanting your playing time), teammates will be a source of pressure as well.
5. Your partner (if you have one): This is a relationship that we will delve into in much detail in a later “secret” in this book, but it is one to be cautious about. Either a relationship from home or a new one at college is a source of major pressure and can compromise any student-athlete who must already live two lives. Only a very supportive partner can work, even if that partner is also a student-athlete, and even then, this is a source of stress.
6. Your hometown media: If you are from a city of more than a million people, you can skip this one. But if you represent a small hometown, this is a big commitment and an important responsibility. You could find, like one of this book’s authors who comes from a town of fifteen thousand people, that you remain a media personality in your town’s local publications many years after your athletic career. This manifests itself in pressure to represent your town, pressure to continue to perform for and contribute to family and friends, and time pressure from the requirements of setting up calls, giving interviews, responding to questions, and maintaining a social media presence.
7. Your Athletic Department: Off-the-field commitments will come from many sources in your university’s athletic department. Media interviews. Pep rallies. Athlete councils (like SAAC). Team meetings. Anti-doping seminars. Marketing. And much more. Be wary of these commitments: they are “time-eaters” and bring their own political pressure.
These seven sources of responsibility (aka pressure) are certainly not an exhaustive list, but they are ones we believe will affect almost all student-athletes. Depending on your particular situation, you will have other sources of responsibility (e.g., a part-time job, a sick parent) and pressure (e.g., a need to travel home, sleep deprivation) that you need to deal with.
. . .
MAX DITTMER (former swimming student-athlete at the University of Iowa, Associate Business and Store Planner at Under Armour)
My parents for the most part were hands-off and supportive for whatever/whenever I needed them. I can’t imagine the extra pressure added if they weren’t the way they are, and I am thankful for that.
Academics were never a problem for me personally, so as long as I was maintaining good grades as expected, I had almost no conversations or pressure from my parents about the academic side of things. However, the pressure from them was put on me at a young age to maintain good grades. Therefore, the pressure of getting good grades just became an internal pressure.
The pressure I received from athletics was more just wanting myself to succeed and be happy. I was always very positive, and never negative. I never felt any pressure from anyone else’s end if I didn’t succeed or do as well as I hoped.
My friends didn’t add any academic or athletic pressure, but more social pressure. I always got the “come out with us,” “skip practice,” or “go to practice hung over.” From the coaches’ standpoint, it depends on the coach, but for the most part they were supportive in both areas, but definitely they were more focused on the athletic side.
For academics, the coaches would give me relative accommodations, but practice/competitions for the most part trumped all. Everything else should be scheduled around these. I remember receiving pressure during finals weeks from coaches for missing practices when we were on “break” and “no required practices” to allow for academic focus during finals week. Essentially you would be shamed for missing unless your test was during finals. That was hard to deal with. For swimming, there was lots of pressure to perform, but never negatively stated if you performed bad, just positive reinforcement when you performed well.
Teammates would pressure me to just stay eligible, that’s it. Athletically, there was pressure and expectations to perform well, come to practice and try hard. If you were slacking for any reason, your teammates would let you know about it.
The hometown media for Iowa didn’t have any backlash academically because the swim team had a great GPA, and athletically, it was mainly positive because we were never under the scrutiny that a football or basketball team would be under. But, the swim team constantly improved over my 4 years, and I do know that there was some media backlash in later years after I left with all the new facilities and a small decline in performance.
The pressures from the Athletic Department were definitely vocalized more on the academics side than the athletics. Our academic help was need-based in the sense that if you sustained above a 3.0 for consecutive semesters, you did not have to log study hours, but if you were below you would need anywhere from four to twelve hours a week. For athletics, not a huge showing from the AD for swimming. During the fundraising years for the new pool, it was more noticeable, but being a non-revenue sport, we were not the main focus so expectations weren’t as big as for other revenue-generating sports.
. . .
Even for the most successful student-athletes, life is challenging and full of sacrifices.
To delve further into the student-athlete role, we interviewed Anson Dorrance, currently the head coach of the women’s soccer program at the University of North Carolina, and the winningest women’s soccer coach of all time. He agreed with the special status of the student-athlete and emphasized the importance of realizing the opportunity and how fragile it can be. He emphasized that “there are so many things you can feed that will derail you if you have ambitions academically and athletically but also in terms of character development.” Each of your sources of responsibility must be planned for and managed in the context of the “double objective” of academic success and athletic excellence. Clearly, Secret 1 relies on understanding Secret 2!
So, what can you do? What is Secret 2 really telling us?
From our perspective, there are five things you need
