It’s 5:30am and my alarm clock is blaring to make sure I don’t sleep through it. I get out of bed and put on the same outfit I wear every other day because we have to match our teammates for practice. I brush my teeth and grab a protein bar that I’m hoping will get me through the morning. My roommates and I all hop into a car and make our way to the track for our least favorite workout. On our drive we make sure everyone is wearing the right color shorts and pinnie and hope that the rest of the team is too so we don’t get in trouble. We get there, warm up and start sprinting around the track every time coach blows her whistle, all before the sun is even up.
For those of us who had an 8:15am class it was a quick turn around, and usually having a shower was not possible. So I threw on my sweatpants and prayed I stayed awake in class. After class it was time for rehab at the facility for a previous injury that I was trying to prevent from coming back. (I slipped a disc in my back while weight lifting during the spring of my freshman year. Luckily it didn’t stop me from playing during the fall season, I only missed the scrimmages in the spring). Then a quick lunch break at “the rot” (cafeteria) before another class.
At 3:00pm we start warm-up for our afternoon practice. At this point it doesn’t matter what has happened that day and there was no time to worry about the test I had in my next class. All my focus has to be on field hockey and getting through the practice. Practice got over around 5:30pm, but then it takes at least another 30 minutes to leave because I have to take an ice bath and get treatment done on my back. Finally dinner time because I am starving. I grab a quick bite to eat and head to the library to get some homework done. On a good night I head home around 9:00pm once my homework is done, but that wasn’t always the case. Then I hang out with my roommates in the kitchen and catch up on what we missed out on during the day, call my family for a quick facetime, and head to bed hopefully before midnight so at least I’ve gotten a little bit of sleep.
Looking at it from a perspective of what I actually did in a day makes it sound pretty awful, haha! But an outsider misses all the little moments that make all the hard times worth it. It’s having the same two girls line up on my right and left during conditioning to get one another through the next sprint. It’s the long bus rides, the conversations and lip sync battles. It’s the games we won in overtime against a rival team. It’s wearing the team gear around campus and feeling apart of the “posse”. It’s winning a conference championship and moving on to playoffs. It’s the prank calls in hotel rooms. It’s sneaking a milkshake with teammates when we’re on a “diet”. It’s having sleepovers in different hotel rooms around the country with your best friends. It’s convincing the hotel shuttle driver to take us to dairy queen for ice-cream and trying not to get caught. It’s laughing until we cry on the locker room floor because of something ridiculous. It’s the lessons I learned and the determination I needed in order to persevere. It’s the best friends I made along the way that made everything worth it.
When we were making a risky decision we always used the excuse “we’re making memories” and looking back on it now, those were the best memories and what we bring up and laugh about. My four years as a NCAA Div. 1 athlete were the hardest but most rewarding years of my life and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything!!
Did you play a sport in college? How was your experience?
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