Second, figure out what you want to do. As noted earlier, meet with advisors, professors, and more. Find a mentor. Connect with a professor. Meet a graduate student. But take that a step further and include this in your plan from Secret 1. Write down your career choices. Your “dream job” (in real life, not as an athlete) postgraduation. Outline what you need to do to get competitive for that job at graduation and go do it.
3. Be responsible for building your own character. When you are trying to balance the pursuit of academic success and high-performance sport, it becomes difficult to focus on other elements of what it takes to be a successful person. Some student-athletes have these traits and high-quality characters but many do not. UNC’s Anson Dorrance provided the following response when we asked him about this:
From my perspective, the definition of student-athlete is that this is part of a process to become a better human being. A critical quality I think most of us overlook when we are evaluating a student-athlete is character development . . . The main priority for someone coming into college as an athlete is to develop his or her character and there are some fantastic benefits to that. I think there is a direct correlation between developing your own character and having a successful athletic and academic career.
Dorrance went on to explain that it is you, the student-athlete, who needs to take responsibility for your own character development:
Student-athletes are supervisors of their own development. They get to guide their own development and obviously most critically, their character development. They also are the supervisors of their own academic world and their athletic world as well. . . . [It] is very critical for any [student-athlete] to understand their opportunity to shape their own future based on the standards they set for themselves. The responsibility they take for themselves.
Practically, what Dorrance advises is very important. You need to take responsibility. You need to plan for your career. You need to do the research to determine what career path (major, courses, internships, etc.) is best for you and will get you a job after graduation.
. . .
HILLARY (BACH) NELSON
(former softball student-athlete at Arizona State University, Partnerships Manager at Positive Coaching Alliance)
Some people enjoy expectations and some people don’t enjoy the added pressure. I would say, for those that do, use it as confidence. Your coach or your parent, whoever is putting those expectations on you, they think you’re capable or else they wouldn’t be asking you to do this. If they are starting you in a big game, it’s because they know you can be successful. I never met a coach who tried to lose. So, if they’re putting you in there, take it as a really big sign of confidence and enjoy it. Enjoy that pressure and go out there and show them that they were right, prove them right. If you don’t enjoy the expectations, try focusing on smaller goals. If the expectation is to pitch a shutout game against the big rival, try focusing on winning every inning or winning each batter or winning each pitch. I want to throw a curveball outside. Did I hit that spot? No. OK, I lost that pitch, but let me win this next pitch. Focus on those small things that you can control, just like your effort on each play or that positive attitude that will help you keep your mind off of the bigger picture.
. . .
4. Be career focused. This point builds upon the others and and is quite simple. Think about your career, alongside your training and competition goals, as a focus of your plans, your choices, your efforts. It is about planning for life after graduation right from the get-go. It is about understanding why joining a student club in your area of interest is better than a night of television each week. In his interview, Schembechler captured this point clearly: “As a student-athlete, you need to realize that you are going to have to change your mindset to be ready for a career. It’s all a matter of who you associate yourself with that allows you to change that mindset.” In order to accomplish this, he advises that you “have to study what the market is like of the industry you want to go into.”
5. Maintain relationships outside your sport. When you come to college as a freshman on scholarship, it is very easy to build your entire social network at college around your team and your teammates. You will spend a lot of time with them, and often you won’t have any close friends from high school who are nearby. Chris Dawson, a former student-athlete, and associate commissioner at the Pac-12 Conference, explained this very clearly:
I think student-athletes can best prepare for the transition out of sport by making sure that when they’re still an active athlete they maintain other relationships and other interests to the greatest extent possible. If your whole world is your team, which is very easy to do when you’re a college athlete, then you lose your support system when your athletics career is over and you lose your sense of identity. I think that the transition can be smoother when you understand that it’s going to happen to you at some point. It’s going to be a different point for different people.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
The three things you can take out of this chapter (if you remember nothing else from what you just read) are these:
1. Have an understanding of who you are and what opportunity you have in front of you. Focus on the NOW with the future in mind and the past in the rearview mirror.
2. Build your character and take responsibility for your actions. As Jim Rohn once said, “You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.”
3. Rise to the challenge, don’t let the pressure get to you, focus on your career, be a great student, and create relationships outside of the teammates you are with 24/7.
Secret 3
Ride Your Success Wheel
THE SECRET IN A FEW WORDS
Current student-athletes sometimes have trouble succeeding in both athletics and school.1 Being a student-athlete is like having a full-time job to go along with school. The average person works forty hours in a week, and a student-athlete is putting in at least seventy-five hours of work a week in just school and sports alone. No one said it was easy, but a little help can go a long way. This chapter will provide strategies for how to succeed as a student-athlete and get set up for success in life after sports with your success wheel.
As we’ve said before, being a student-athlete is a privilege and also a choice. Student-athletes are among the hardest-working students on campus because of their dual commitments, but that doesn’t mean they are held to lower standards academically. The institution and athletic department want to be known for having great student-athletes who can succeed in both academics and athletics.
RIDE YOUR SUCCESS WHEEL
If you are a student-athlete who thinks that you don’t have time to put a 100 percent effort into both academics and athletics, you are wrong. Colby Targun, a former student-athlete at Texas State University, played both football and baseball for all four years. He now works for the NFL at the league’s headquarters in New York City, and says, “Having the proper balance between academics, athletics, and social life is imperative to being successful as a student-athlete. All this while having attention [to] detail, organization, and a drive to succeed will make for a great experience.”
Colby says he had three priorities as a student-athlete that led to his success as both a student and an athlete. He summarizes his priorities: “Having my coursework completed in time and receiving good grades, performing on the playing field, and developing myself as a person overall (working on relationships, my future, etc.).” He remembers, “I was always working to get as far ahead as possible with my coursework, therefore allowing me to focus as much as