The Stress and Expectations of Student Athletes By: Kristi Barnes

Draft 1 Every day after school, the track team has their normal practice for a few hours. However, on this day, the athletes needed to vent a little bit to one another. So while all the runners are finishing up and putting away all of their gear, a few of them get together and begin to chat. Lu the Leopard: Man coach wants me to do the 200 meter and 400 meter sprints plus the 4 x 400 meter relay at the next meet. Chen the Cougar: Whoa. He is putting a lot of pressure on you this year. Lu the Leopard: I know. He expects so much of me. Kimball the Kangaroo: Are you trying to make captain this year? Wilson the Wolf: What about all your school work? Arent you taking a bunch of hard classes? Lu the Leopard: I know. I know. Its going to be extremely hard. I just dont know what to do. Judge the Jaguar: Coaches and teachers put so much pressure on just because we are athletes. They expect us to be able to produce A+ effort in both the classroom and on the track. Chen the Cougar: I know I have three tests this week plus we have the big meet this weekend. Kimball the Kangaroo: Cherry the Cheetah is also having a party this weekend. Anybody who is anybody is going to be there. Wilson the Wolf: Oh darn! I have a huge exam to study for. Chen the Cougar: Come on man you can skip that. This will be the party of the year. Wilson the Wolf: Nah I cant. My parents have been riding me hard about doing well this semester. I cant blow it now. Lu the Leopard: I know what youre talking about. My parents flipped when they saw the last test grade I brought home.

Judge the Jaguar: Its like our parents only worry about school, or coaches on care about winning, our teachers care about both, and our friends only pay attention to us if we are winning and go to all the parties. Kimball the Kangaroo: Well, I mean we are the heart and soul of the school. We are the athletes. We make the party a party. Wilson the Wolf: How do you do is man? How are you able to handle all of this? Kimball the Kangaroo: You will never get away from the expectations. No matter what you do, there will always be people there to judge you and tell you what to do, but the stress, thats a different story. Stress is hard enough to deal with. Lu the Leopard: Yeah! I used to run to relieve stress and now running causes stress. I dont know how to get rid of all this. Chen the Cougar: Dude stress is a rough thing. It can cause some issues. My brother was so stressed out one time that he took a week off from practice. Coach benched him the next meet. Wilson the Wolf: But your brother was the best. What happened? Chen the Cougar: School work, practice, and home life just got to be too much for him. He needed a few days off. Judge the Jaguar: Man I need that. I wonder if Coach would give us a day off. Like just one. Or maybe he could just give us one easy and fun practice. You know like something to get our minds off of everything else. Kimball the Kangaroo: Thats a good joke. If Coach ever did that I think we would have to check his stress level because they would be going through the roof. Wilson the Wolf: Its not like we are bad at school or anything, we just need better time management skills Judge the Jaguar: We just need more time in general. Wilson the Wolf: We are good with the whole having an end in mind and setting goal for ourselves, we get that from sports and our coaches, but what we need are ways to apply this to everyday life. Chen the Cougar: I agree. My goals always have something to do with sports and how I can better myself. I need to set goals that will help me in both school and the real world. Lu the Leopard: Well you already made captain so you achieved one goal.

Chen the Cougar: Yeah, but now I just need to do well on this next exam and I would really like to get Homecoming King if I could. Kimball the Kangaroo: That is all possible if you have the determination to do it. Chen the Cougar: I think I do, the hard part is dealing with all the stress. I need to prioritize my list of want tos into what I believe I can accomplish at the rate Im at. Wilson the Wolf: That sounds like a good plan to me. Judge the Jaguar: We are just going to have to make the best of what we have. Whether we like it or not, we are athletes and we will be held to higher expectations than the average student. Our parents, coaches, teachers, and peers know we can handle the pressure and stress; we just need to show them how to do it. Kimball the Kangaroo: So Im going to assume that we arent going to Cherry the Cheetahs party. Wilson the Wolf: I know Im not. Im going to hang back and study. Chen the Cougar: Me too. I mean there will be more parties. We can go to the next one, thats if we dont have too much work. Kimball the Kangaroo: Okay I agree with that. Judge the Jaguar: I really dont care for all this stress and expectations stuff, but I sure do love being an athlete. All of them: Agreed.

Draft 2

Stress and expectations are two of the biggest factors that student athletes have to deal with. The expectations can come from themselves, their coaches, their peers, their families, their teachers, and even strangers from around town. Stress on the other hand, can come from many influences. Stress can be brought on by school work, family issues, and problems with friends, jobs, or even athletics itself. That is right, even athletics can cause athletes stress. Everyone deals with stress in their own way. Most people handle it through lifting weights or running, basically they cope with stress through exercise. The problem for athletes is that this exercise is what has been giving them stress. Always having to perform better and communicate better, can cause some people to get frustrated. When practicing three to five days a week, some serious stress can build up in that amount of time. Not only do athletes stress over practices and performances, but they also stress over meeting expectations. Teachers, students, and coaches all expect for the athletes to do well in games and meets; to represent their school with pride and to win as much as they can. In an athletes head, winning comes with respect. The more they win, the more people will look up to them and respect them. Winning a game is just one small step that has been accomplished in the overall goals view. Through personal experience I have learned that by setting small minor goals will help you accomplish a much larger and overall objective.

Respect is huge in the athletic world. You have to respect your other teammates because when in a team sport everyone will take turns being leaders and followers. You must respect your leaders and trust that they are guiding you in the right direction. However, the tables will easily turn, when you become the leader, you must respect others and not become overpowering. There is a very fine line that divides guiding and controlling. Good leaders know where that line is and try their hardest not to cross it. By staying on the guiding side, one will develop followers who will trust and have faith that you will help them towards the end. One of the hardest parts for athletes is trying to maintain good grades and also good standing on the team. Time management is a difficult task to master for anyone but being an athlete with a strict schedule makes it harder to fit in school work and other activities. I speak from personal experience. I played volleyball while also trying to maintain a high grade point average. Not only did I play high school volleyball and club volleyball, but I also tried keeping my grades up high enough so that I may become an engineer in the future. This was a difficult task that put a tremendous amount of stress on me. To deal with my personal stress, I would go to the gym and run and workout for hours. It also helped that my gym would have pick up volleyball games occasionally. This aided me extensively because there were no expectations or prior views of how I should play. I was able to feel like a kid again and play for fun. That alone took an enormous amount of stress off my shoulders. I made so many friends from this. These friends did not know anything about me actually playing volleyball or anything. They liked me for just me and how much fun we would all have on the court.

The expectations that came along with it all were a different story. Although some of the expectations that I dealt with were contributors to the stress, they are what inspired me to do better. Being that I was a high school athlete, a girl, and wanting to do engineering; put a great deal of anticipations on my plate. Every high school athlete is asked if they are going to play in college and if they want to go on to be a professional. All of that is what adds stress. Having these people think you are good enough to play in college creates a little ball of joy inside you and it pushes you to try harder for that goal. Gender is also looked at. Girls have been stereotyped as to not being as skilled as men when it comes to the workforce. Therefore, the expectations of a girl to do well in school and to get high grades, weighs heavily. However, one of the greatest expectations that I deal with, are the views of me becoming an engineer. Since I am a girl trying to get into a mans major, all eyes are on me. These are only a few of the expectations that I, along with other athletes cope with on a daily basics. The stress and expectations however, are different from both college and high school athletes. In high school you need to keep your grades up so that you can get into a college of your choice. High school athletes also have to worry about college scouts and impressing them with their athletic abilities. College athletes on the other hand, need to keep their grades up because that will be their career. These students will not always be playing ball for their entire life, they will need to be able to hold a sustainable job when it is all said and done. College athletes also have to worry about professional scouts. Becoming a professional athlete is a dream for most little kids but it will only come with hard work and dedication.

All of these factors together make up the stress and expectations that are brought upon one when they decide to become a student athlete. Being an athlete is not all about the glitz and the fame and the social life, but much more than that. Athletes need to be both skilled and dedicated individuals. With the right time management and stress relievers, these people will go far.