Louis Dubick plays lacrosse at the University of Maryland. He committed to UMD in his sophomore year of high school, but knew he would play the sport in college since his freshmen year at Winston Churchill High School.
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| google.com |
Louis, currently a freshman, does not plan on playing
professional lacrosse after graduating college and instead plans to get a job
on Wall Street using his finance degree from the Robert H. Smith School of
Business.
College students who are not athletes have one job at
school: get good grades to get a good job. Athletes have two: get good grades
to stay on the team and actually perform well on the team.
And when your sport is you job, grades start to become less
of a priority. When grades start to become less of a priority, a good job after
college becomes less obtainable.
Athletes are at a disadvantage when pursuing their
academic goals due to time commitments.
When students have a commitment to also play a sport
during college it takes away from time when regular students are participating
in clubs, going to networking events, or having internships.
I was able to talk to Louis about his experience on the team,
the challenges he faces as a student athlete, and how he addresses those
challenges. When asked if he thinks student athletes are struggling to compete
with non-athletes when it comes to getting jobs, Louis said it’s mainly the
time commitment that is the issue.
“Because we put so much time into our sport, we don’t have
time to build as great of a resume or join clubs as everyone else. We have to
be really flexible. We can’t join clubs that we are interested in. This comes
back to haunt us when getting a job because it only says “lacrosse” on the
resume. The advantage goes to the non-athlete.”
Coaches have high expectations of athletes that involve
showing up to class and practice on time, doing well in school, and performing
their best on the field or court.
Since most athletes think they will go pro, they focus most
of their time on their sport. The time commitment that comes with being a college
athlete is huge. If not in class, the students are either practicing or doing
team-related activities.
Dubick explains that the first couple weeks were the hardest
because he wasn’t used to the schedule. Regular students are focused on getting
acclimated to their class schedule and teachers’ styles, while student athletes
are focused on that, plus their workout and practice schedules.
Louis describes a typical day he experiences as a lacrosse player in college as a day that involves a lot of physical training and team activities.
He says the hardest part of managing his time is knowing his
own limits as far as rest and play. It can be physically challenging when most
of your time is spent doing physical activities, and then when you have free
time, you have to decide if you want to rest or gather the energy to go out
with your friends.
Louis says that it can be hard to manage all of the pressure
when everyone expects you to do well. The main pressure comes from the coaches.
They are the ones that manage you as a player and tell you what your role is as
a student athlete.
Student athletes are struggling to compete with the regular
student body, because it seems they have less time to participate in activities
on campus that are non-sport related. However, if they take advantage of the
resources provided to them as athletes and enjoy the experience of being on the
field or court and in the classroom, they can go on to accomplish their
realistic academic goals.
Even if athletes are not planning to play professionally,
being on the team provides a unique college lifestyle that most students do not
get to experience. “You have to love the game. Work hard because you love it,”
Louis advises.
Athletes pursue common and “easy” degrees to pass
college and focus on sports.
Another reality check for college athletes: receiving a
general degree does not always get you the job you want.
An article
written by Kevin Trahan on SB Nation
stresses how the NCAA is allowing athletes to receive “easy” degrees to fall
back on in case the pro-sport-life does not work out. Trahan explains that sometimes an “easy”
degree is the only degree athletes can receive “either because that is all they
can handle or because the coach tells them to.”
Trahan believes that the NCAA’s perception of academic
success for athletes is flawed. The NCAA is focused on athletes receiving
degrees when really they should be focused on the education received necessary
to get the jobs athletes want. Additionally, athletes are constantly placed
into majors that do not always provide them with much success in the work
force. They also seem to cluster into similar majors as their teammates.
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| USA Today |
USA Today expands
on the topic of major clustering, explaining that the rules made in 2003 by the NCAA
intended to improve graduation rates may have in reality caused the athletic
departments to encourage athletes to take easy majors to satisfy the growing
rates.
Athletes who are passionate about their majors use
extra resources provided to them on campus to compete with regular students and
build on their efforts towards success after college.
Student athletes can access a lot of resources provided to
them to help them achieve their academic goals. Dubick says UMD set him up with
advisors, tutors, and tools that he uses to do well in school and later pursue
a job out of college.
Louis explains the steps he is taking to gain work experience
is by, “Going to see my college counselor, the career specialist on campus, as
well as using the network back home and the network I made here to look for an
internship this summer to build a resume to hopefully receive a job that I want
out of college.”
Freshmen lacrosse players are required to spend eight hours
a week in the Xfinity Center for study hall. And, all athletes receive free
tutors.
As far as building a networking goes, Louis says playing
a sport can actually help. “There are so many successful lacrosse players on
Wall Street. All lacrosse schools are good so the competitive nature drives
them towards Wall Street. The network the sport creates is amazing. The friends
you make go far beyond the field. Since we don’t join fraternities, these are
the guys you live with, play with, and hangout with. The only time you’re not
with them is when you’re in class or studying.”
He also says Maryland lacrosse has a networking app
that lets you search UMD lacrosse alumni and gives exact pin locations on a map
that shows where the graduates are in the U.S.
There is a major percentage difference in athletes’
perception of going pro versus reality.
Louis is part of the group of student athletes who
want to get an office job out of college and do not go pro. However the numbers
are low for the percentage of student athletes who accept the reality of not
going pro.
Jake New has an article
on Inside Higher Ed that explores the
difference between athletes’ perception of going pro versus reality. Gershon
Tenenbaum, a sports psychology professor at Florida State University, explains
that it is a “self-bias phenomenon” that shows why student athletes think they
are
New says the false perception is partly due to how
colleges portray their athletic success. UCLA for example, describes themselves
on their recruiting website described as “#1 in Olympic Gold Medals from 1984
to 2008" and “#1 in professional athletes.”
Athletes may view this
statement and think UCLA is their best way of making it professionally because
so many other successful athletes went to the school.
New also explains that the confidence stems from how
far successful college athletes have come already. They are used to
continuously moving on to higher level leagues and being at the top of their
programs.
Dan Lebowitz, the executive director of Northeastern
University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, clarifies the problem, “By
the time a basketball or football player gets to Division I or Division II,
they’ve already been a star in their own town and community. They have been
elevated to celebrity status at such a young age, before their frontal lobe has
even fully developed. It creates a high confidence level, but also a delusion
around what’s actually possible.”
And when athletes think of college sports as nothing
more than auditions for professional leagues, Lebowitz said, they're less
likely to focus on studying or earning a degree.
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