As I dropped my car off for its scheduled maintenance, I was thankful the dealer had the local paper with its sports section still intact.  At the Center for College Planning, and outside my job, I spend a good deal of time and effort covering high school athletics and working with many of the names sprawled throughout the local paper. It’s time and effort very well-spent and I’m grateful to be able to work around my passion of helping student-athletes. What I love about helping student-athletes is that there is a kind of innocence to high school sports and it’s a genuine piece of America in which many of us, even those who are not sports fans, can identify. But I think that some of us forget these players are high school student-athletes (translation: kids) and, unlike some big-time college or pro sports that many of us enjoy, the emphasis here really is on the word "student". These are, first of all, high school students, and while we enjoy their athletic accomplishments, it is their academics that must come first.

As I sat at my desk thinking about this and after reading this article, I realized many of the students that I work with, meet on the road or at the field really have trouble pulling out the word “athlete” from “student-athlete”.  I, like many of these student-athletes, will be the first to say that I put athletics first in high school.  I felt a sense of entitlement as an athlete, which dissipated with a new sense of maturity and a serious sports injury. After getting injured, it truly opened my eyes to the fact that it really didn’t matter what my batting average was, but what did matter was how high my GPA was.  Because after that last pitch, last five seconds, or last lap, most of us will leave college athletics.  More importantly, we will be leaving with a college degree and a better sense of self.   It’s not the homeruns we hit, or the records we set that will be remembered, but who we are as people, the relationships we made, and the families we will one day build. 

So I encourage student-athletes to remember you are more than an athlete – you can model yourself as someone with character and moral values.  Strive to create a balance of purpose and to use the values that you learned in athletics to prepare you for the successes in the game of life.   Think about how you want to be remembered - as a person of character, a defined student, or an athlete? 

Best,
Jay