Where did the time go?

BY: GRACE S.

Student athletes are expected to balance both work and play on a daily basis. On the field and in the classroom, extreme excellence is expected. Time management is a key faucet in maintaining good grades while being a star player. This process can have both positive and negatives effects.

Nathaniel Dersom, a senior at the school, maintains an unweighted GPA of 4.0 and plays soccer, tennis, and is a kicker for the football team. An estimated 12.5 hours is spent in a game or practicing for sports each week, while an estimated 8 hours is spent studying or doing homework. He spoke on the importance of using any time one has for doing something productive. “You can’t really waste time. You have to either be studying, or at practice, or doing your homework. You only have so many hours in the day.”

Johnna “Lexi” Bowman, a senior at the school, maintains a 3.7 GPA while playing soccer, basketball, and softball in their respective seasons. She jokes that her grade point average is only that high because she has to keep it up in order to be eligible for sports. To her, it’s an honor to be an athlete. “I guess it’s just kind of a privilege to have the talent to actually play a sport and be decent at it.”

A freshman student that prefers to go unnamed says in her classes she is achieving mostly A’s with a couple of B’s. She currently plays golf for the school, lacrosse for an outside organization, and plans to be on the basketball team this upcoming season. She says, because she is not on her phone often, she has the time necessary for getting her academic and athletic work done. “If I’m at home, I will either go outside and practice what I need to practice, or I will stay inside and do the homework I need to finish.”

All three students find substantial benefits from being on a sports team. Dersom claims, “It makes you more of an extrovert, in a sense. It kind of brings out the social side of you, because once you get your endorphins going you’re a little bit more willing to have fun and stuff like that.” The other two students shared his views on this, while the unnamed student added that you gain social skills while participating. “If you get in trouble in a sport or in school, you have to do some sort of consequence like run or sit the bench. So it teaches you not to do any of that stuff again.”

Confidence was another benefit that was touched on by both Dersom and the unnamed student. When asked about things that have been gained from sports, Dersom stated “you get a lot more self confidence”. The ups and downs of a challenging season are what boosts the anonymous student’s confidence. “If you lose a game you can win the next one so it kind of builds your confidence,” she says.

While there is a lot of good to come out of being an athlete, there are some drawbacks that come with athletically being a star.

The interviewed seniors, Dersom and Bowman, confirmed they often miss out on sleep in order to complete assigned homework or study for a test. Dersom calls it a “vicious cycle” when students lose sleep because of academics, but they need more sleep in order to perform athletically at their peak. They both talk on the fact that they catch up on sleep over the weekend. Bowman recalls a previous weekend where she napped for four hours and still went to bed at 8:30 for her regular bedtime. “I sleep all the time...so yeah you definitely gain your sleep on the weekends.”

Two of the interviewees believe academics will be more beneficial than sports for the future and in the long run. While acknowledging this belief, Bowman counters with the fact that she enjoys sports more. In reference to school: “It’s going to get me somewhere in life, more than a sport would, because a sport is gonna end after a while...And, I mean, school is definitely more important, but I just love sports.”

The administration at West Jefferson High School care deeply about the students and their pursuits both in and out of the classroom.

Mr. Daulton, the current Athletic Director, believes the WJHS student athletes are doing “very well” in terms of maintaining good grades and playing sports. “Overall, I think as both high school and middle school, our athletes do very well in terms of keeping up with their academics.” In his time at the school, there have been less than five instances where students became ineligible to participate. “Sometimes kids just have bad semesters, sometimes kids just have a bad nine weeks, it happens. We try not to hold it against them. We just try to be there for them to make sure they get everything corrected and that way, the next season, they can participate in sports.”

To be athletically eligible, a student must maintain a 1.5 GPA according to district standards and have 5 credits worth of classes according to Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) rules. Quarter grades are the only criteria considered when determining their eligibility of playing. “So when grade cards come out, that’s what the athletic department looks at.”

Daulton explains being on a team and working towards a goal has helped slacking students realize their potential, get their grades up, and “develop themselves as a person, rather than just going through the motions of day to day class.”

He also states time management is the key to being a student athlete because it is a skill that will transcend high school. “Time management is a very tricky thing to learn, but once you learn it at an early age, you’re going to see that it will carry beyond everything you do... it’s a skill you need to build, it’s not a natural thing.”

Time management is a skill vital for any career, path of life, or schooling that any given person will undertake or accomplish. High school is a prime opportunity to form these habits and being a student athlete is one achievable way to do just that.

They are our friends. They are our siblings. They are our mentors. And they are our student athletes.