Realize that you are special and fortunate. The opportunity to both continue to progress your life (i.e., study toward the pursuit of a career) and concurrently be a high-performance athlete in arguably the top sport development system in the world is an experience to cherish and one you will miss (and often talk about) when you are older. The combination of your two lives will help you build character. Embrace the student-athlete status role and put your focus on those two outcomes, little else. Dan Butterly, Senior Associate Commissioner for the Mountain West Conference, explains very clearly why you want to realize the unique student-athlete role.
Student-athletes continue to be outstanding leaders. That has not changed over the years. There are tremendous traits student-athletes have that they often undersell on their resume or during a job interview. Team building, how to deal with adversity, excellent health and wellness, leadership traits and a zest for success. One of the great trends I have seen from this generation of student-athletes compared to previous student-athletes is how they venture outside their own sport, come together with student-athletes in other sports, and have created a significant voice and leadership group not only to make the NCAA better, but by leading, they will make their generation better too. When I was an undergraduate, I heard student-athletes from other teams often complain about all the great resources football and men’s basketball received. Now, many of those same benefits are available to all student-athletes because of the voice this generation of student-athletes has put forth.
As Butterly emphasizes, the successful completion of your plan (Secret 1) and deep understanding of the privileged role you are in (this secret) will launch your career.
2. Be a student AND an athlete. Many student-athletes in the “other 99 percent,” even though they realize that a professional career or Olympic opportunity is not probable, still view themselves as athletes first and not as a student. If you know you will not play professionally, you must view yourself as a student first (or at least tied for first) in all things and all activities. Glenn Schembechler, a former scout and coach, and now counsel to athletes, provides the following support:
High school athletes who earn a college scholarship aren’t getting it for the right reason. Many high school athletes don’t identify themselves as students first. They see it as this opportunity for just sports, with school on the side; as opposed to getting school paid for and getting to play sports. You need to identify yourself as a student first because you need to have a realistic outlook on where you are going to go after playing sports in college.
However, what Schembechler outlines is much easier to say than to do. So, you must make being a student as important as (if not more important than) being an athlete. A balanced approach is highly recommended.
Schembechler supports a couple of specific points that we want to emphasize within this secret. The first is related to the choice of major or degree or area of concentration. Often, as student-athletes, you are so focused on sport and competition that you just want “a degree.” You may not think about where your interest is for a career postcollege. The focus is on picking some classes that fit your training schedule and will allow you to graduate in four years.
But if that’s the case, you are not spending enough time thinking about what you should be taking in order set yourself up for a career postgraduation. Student-athletes are often too busy to meet with an advisor or to get to know a professor, or to even consider who their favorite professor is! Setting yourself up for success after college needs to be a priority. You need to find your passion outside of your sport. Schembechler agreed and gave some great advice: “Find something that you are passionate about so that you can wake up and give a 100 percent effort to it each day. If you aren’t passionate, you are going to fall behind quickly in anything you do.”
This advice is very appropriate, and following it is not beyond the time or resources available to any student-athlete. Before your season starts, or on a quiet weekend, spend some time thinking about what you love, what your favorite class is. Then, get to know a professor or two (or four!) in that area, get some advice, and get into the program you are interested in (one that ideally has job opportunities). And, in this effort, reach out to family members, friends, and others who know those areas, have connections, and can help advise you on great choices.
The second piece of advice we’d like to emphasize is the vital importance to get work experience during your four years as a student-athlete. Of course, this is easier said than done, given your busy schedule of academics and athletics. Schembechler advises that you have to “take advantage of the opportunities to do internships and other experiences so that you can dip your toes into the industry of focus.” This is a key point. To get ahead in most fields today (engineering, business, health professions, technical, etc.), the more experiences you have on your resume, the better you will do and the more competitive you will be for jobs.
Quite simply, four years of being a student-athlete cannot compete—in most cases—with a well-prepared graduate who is not an athlete but who has a practicum, two internships, an independent study with an expert in the field, and related summer jobs. This is not to say that one path is better than the other, but just to underline the reality that a student-athlete faces at the end of senior year. So how do you do this? How do you fit these practical experiences into your busy life? Well, a few pieces of advice.
First, you need to network with the right people, inside and outside the university. Inside, this includes career coaches, advisors, faculty members, researchers, and administrators (including deans and support staff). These are people who have your best interests at heart, contacts in your field, and a mandate to help you. But they won’t be able to help you unless they know who you are and unless you ask. Get to know them, attend events, join clubs and student organizations. Sure, you have to balance this with your training and competition, but that is no excuse. You have off-seasons, downtime, days off, and free time. The trick is to replace some of the “useless” activities like watching TV and playing video games with positive ones. Instead of going out one night, join a student club in your area of interest. Instead of sleeping in one day, go to a career fair. These are very simple choices, with very significant positive outcomes.
Second, figure out what you want to do. As noted earlier, meet with advisors, professors, and more. Find a mentor. Connect with a professor. Meet a graduate student. But take that a step further and include this in your plan from Secret 1. Write down your career choices. Your “dream job” (in real life, not as an athlete) postgraduation. Outline what you need to do to get competitive for that job at graduation and go do it.
3. Be responsible for building your own character. When you are trying to balance the pursuit of academic success and high-performance sport, it becomes difficult to focus on other elements of what it takes to be a successful person. Some student-athletes have these traits and high-quality characters but many do not. UNC’s Anson Dorrance provided the following response when we asked him about this:
From my perspective, the definition of student-athlete is that this is part of a process to become a better human being. A critical quality I think most of us overlook when we are evaluating a student-athlete is character development . . . The main priority for someone coming into college as an athlete is to develop his or her character and there are some fantastic benefits to that. I think there is a direct correlation between developing your own character and having a successful athletic and academic career.
Dorrance went on to explain that it is you, the student-athlete, who needs to take responsibility for your own character development:
Student-athletes are supervisors of their own development. They get to guide their own development and obviously most critically, their character development. They also are the supervisors of their own academic world and their athletic world as well. . . . [It] is very critical for
