Folks – what’s happenin. You been listening to the new M.I.A. mixtape? I guess it’s a couple months old. Relatively new.
It’s called “VICKI LEEKX”. Get it? Wikileaks, Vicki leekx. Clever huh?
So I was reading one of the like eight recent boston college sports blogs that have popped up recently and I read the quote below. It started off with talking to scott van pelt from espn who gave these guys advice on how to do a good blog. He pretty much told them not to be negative. I then read the below which I really liked:
“Bloggers in general have very little concept of how much time and effort many sports figures put into training, coaching, and developing game strategies. Athletes and coaches put in countless hours during the week and many bloggers think they have the ability to ruthlessly critique them after watching a game for five minutes on the couch.”
So, I’m obsessed with sports and sports blogs. But at heart, I’m an athlete. Fans are very, very quick to criticize. In terms of college athletics (which are amateur endeavors, not professional ones, which we all seem to forget half the time), I feel justified in commenting on the athlete/fan dichotomy (ugh I hate that word).
People that haven’t been a college athlete don’t understand what it takes. I rowed crew, which I still think is the most demanding sport in existence, so I feel extra qualified to talk about how hard it is to be a student athlete. Here are some challenges that come to mind:
1. Travelling. You have to go to competitions around the country. This means that you’ll miss an exam and have to retake it, you’ll miss the big party weekend of the term and only hear stories from your friends, and you’ll leave your girlfriend for a week because you have to go to California (pretty sure that all these things happened to me, some of them multiple times).
2. Exhaustion. Imagine that your class is on the third floor and it’s 9:55 AM. You had practice at 7:15 AM. You start walking up the stairs and your legs hurt. They hurt the whole way up and the whole way down. Not only that, but you’re so tired in the evenings that you might not go out, you might not have enough energy to do all your reading, and you will probably have to go to sleep early because you must get 8-9 hours of sleep, otherwise you’ll be a wreck at practice the next day.
3. Isolation. You spend hours a day with your teammates. You practice together, eat together, compete together, go to spring training together, go to winter training together. Some guys live with each other, some guys only hang out with each other. If you’re too busy with your sport and classes, then you might not have much time to meet other people in the school, which stinks. You might also not have enough time for other extracurriculars that you’re interested in.
Anyway, I had to vent a little. Being a college athlete was really, really hard, and I sometimes get the impression that these sports bloggers and fans and commenters were not college athletes, so they are a little unclear on what it even takes to graduate in four years while being a varsity athlete the whole time.
Aright the rant’s over. Spring’s comin everyone, I can smell it.
-Dave
