Colby advises student-athletes to “have an eye on the future, but also live in the moment. Don’t worry about the next chapter so much that you miss out on your junior and senior year. Everything will work out eventually as it should if you are prepared.”
THE STUDENT-ATHLETE SUCCESS WHEEL
In writing this chapter, we reviewed previous work in the area (e.g., Comeaux and Harrison 2011),2 built on our own experiences and backgrounds, brainstormed, and developed our own version of a “success wheel” that you can follow and use to track your efforts and decisions as you progress through your experiences as a student-athlete. The following graphic depicts the wheel.
The Success Wheel, shown on the previous page, highlights the top ten aspects of how to succeed as a student-athlete. Each of these aspects, or spokes on the wheel, is discussed in detail in the following paragraphs. The core idea behind the success wheel is that each aspect builds on the others to cumulatively drive your success.
Priorities: Priorities are arguably the step where the success wheel starts to turn. It is extremely important that you prioritize your time—your most important resource. Sleep is incredibly important for an athlete’s success, and you should aim to get an average of eight hours a night. That leaves, again on average, sixteen hours in a day to do everything else. Class and homework will take up a minimum of five hours a day. Training, practice, and competitions will occupy close to six hours on average daily. Eating, bio-breaks, and any other obligations get the leftover five hours maximum during the day. If you are dating someone or in a relationship, you need to make time for that person. Same with friends and social time with teammates. A social life is important, as well as any other extracurricular activities. If you want to be successful, having your priorities written out is a must. Prioritizing your time is crucial in becoming the best all-around student-athlete you can possibly be.
Relationship Building: Once you’ve set your priorities, building relationships that are key to those priorities is crucial in constructing a support system around what you are trying to focus on and achieve as a student-athlete. Aside from your family, creating relationships with coaches, teammates, professors, and friends is the minimum. Over the years, you will figure out the people you can rely on, trust, and go to for help. By building each relationship, you will gain support in the important areas of life. Developing relationships (e.g., a favorite professor becomes a mentor) that create trust in people to seek advice from is extremely important in making educated decisions on important life, career, academic, and athletic choices.
Using Resources: Universities and colleges provide multiple resources for students, and you should take advantage of them. Again, these resources should align with your priorities and relationship-building efforts. The array of resources the university provides might include a tutor, librarian, mentor, career coach, psychologist, nutritionist, athletic trainer, or anyone else who is there to help you become the best student-athlete you can possibly imagine. The extra effort and time you devote to using these resources can make a huge impact on your college experience. You won’t have all of these great “free” resources after you graduate, so why not take advantage of them now?
Mentors: An example of an ideal relationship (from a prior spoke (or leg) of the success wheel) is a mentorship relationship in which you connect to a key person who will help guide you through your decisions and life steps. Not everyone has a mentor, but we strongly advise you to work to find one. If you have more than one, even better. No two people have the same type of mentor and no mentor-mentee relationship is the same. Mentors are people who have experienced what you are going through and can offer advice or help for many situations. Mentors tend to be older than you, but someone who is just a few years older may be able to provide a more recent perspective on things. Depending on how the relationship works, age doesn’t really matter. Find a mentor who cares about your personal development and long-term success.
Time Management: The previous elements all support the implementation of time management. Time management is the efficiency with which you use your time. It is important to any student in any context, but it is extremely crucial to a student-athlete. It sounds like such a simple aspect of life, but may be one of the hardest. Time management is a skill, and it can be acquired through experience. This is a skill that translates best into the working world, because it directly relates to priorities (i.e., if you know your priorities, you can allocate your time) and use of your valuable resource of time (i.e., the better your time management skills, the more efficient you can be with your efforts and the more activities you can fit into a busy schedule).
Organization: Organization may sound like a simple term (that usually gets overlooked), but it truly plays a large role in the success of a student-athlete. In the context of the wheel, once you know your priorities, relationships to build, resources available, and time plans, getting organized is a key next step. With how much goes on in one day, you must be organized in terms of where you need to be at certain times, and what is due and when. A calendar can be very useful, as well as utilizing technology for reminders and notes. Ultimately, organization helps you prioritize your activities and stay on top of what you need to achieve. A lack of organization will cause extra stress, missed deadlines, and possible tardiness. Being organized helps show responsibility and assertiveness, two important characteristics. And make sure you know what the difference is between time management and organization.
Motivation: Student-athletes must be motivated in the classroom, in the weight room, and at practice. Motivation stems from wanting to be successful, but the motivation must be for the right reasons. It comes from you, not your parents, your coach, or anyone else. The only person who can truly motivate you is yourself.
School/Sport Balance: As you build your plan for time, resources, mentors, networking, and other aspects, a balance between your dual objectives is important. Many coaches and administrators will argue about the relative importance of school and sport. However, the term “student-athlete” means that being a student takes priority over being an athlete. Today, we see a lot of “athlete-students.” Don’t be an athlete-student. Take pride in your education and understand your sport participation as a key aspect of the student experience.
However, regardless of what you think, stay balanced. Some readers may balance the two areas 50/50 and some may balance it 60/40 or 40/60. There is no “right” balance as long as you are aware of where your balance should be and where it actually is. Knowing that your high-level athletic career likely won’t continue after you graduate, why wouldn’t academics take priority?
Networking: Closely aligned with mentorship, networking is widely known to be one of the most important characteristics of success. More than ever in today’s society, it is all about who you know, not necessarily what you know. As a student-athlete, you have more opportunities to network than any other student. You are automatically connected with alumni from your sport, as well as with coaches and administrators, plus their networks. Why not leverage those opportunities and network? Find out what they really do, how they got to where they are, and what you can learn from them about different career paths.
People are more likely to hire someone they know or share a common bond with, and the more people you know, the more connected you will be. If one individual cannot directly help you, that person may know someone who can. Build your network of contacts and use LinkedIn to network as well. Networking is extremely important because it allows you to develop relationships over an extended period of time. The longer you can build a relationship with someone, the more that individual will be willing to do something good for you.
From the collective experience of the authors, we know that much of the above narrative sounds trite. If you find that many pieces of advice sound repetitive and obvious, that’s because “Trite is Right.” After many years in the sports business, we believe there is no such thing as a network that is too big. One of us recently met an Olympic swimmer who will soon graduate