Suzanne Piela, who was also a large-animal veterinarian, has supported success both academically and in the riding ring. As my equine science teacher, she nurtures my love for animals and piqued my interest in pursuing a career in veterinary medicine. Next News Story. These high school students will herein be referred to as Scholar-Athletes. The purpose of this study is to recognize and awaken academic potential, as well as physical and intellectual perseverance, in today's Scholar-Athletes who seek to achieve successful careers outside of sport and thus make lifelong contributions to society.
This review recognizes the need for Scholar-Athletes to tap into skill-sets they already possess, but need to develop, in order to successfully complete their education and attain meaningful and fulfilling careers. NCAA-regulated team sports in the U. One might assume that these invaluable traits are fully appreciated, understood and integrated in academic and athletic programs.
Yet, in stark contrast, the current higher education system still largely perceives academics and athletics as polarized, unequal, and separate entities LeWinter et al. This societal attitude is driving a spirit of virtual animosity between academics and athletics on many U. Beyer and Hannah, As a result, the fundamental integrity of higher education continues to be threatened by students whose sole incentive is to become an elite athlete.
This topic directly confronts and evaluates this perceived status quo , which is creating a damaging rift between academics and athletics. In reality, both academics and athletics are complimentary and mutually supportive endeavors. The Scholar-Athlete is therefore presented in this topic as a student who possesses precisely the professional skill set needed to eventually excel in everything from science to the humanities. It is not easy for the scholar-athlete to fully commit to the dual role of scholar and athlete.
It takes a person's full dedication for each of those roles. Talent is not only found in sports, but also comes in effective scheduling for classes, study time, work-outs, events, and rest Axtell, This ability to juggle everything becomes an asset when the scholar-athlete proceeds toward a career after they are finished playing their respective sport. To be successful in career transition, athletes must proactively focus on the importance, awareness, and marketability of transferable skills McKnight, The Scholar-Athlete tool kit Figure 1 includes: a Teamwork —a person learns to get along with, work with and connect with other people who are different from them in order to achieve a common greater purpose or goal; b Work ethic —a person develops a strong belief that there is value to working hard to achieve honorable goals, the process of which develops resiliency and strength of character; c Commitment —a person gains understanding that with every great freedom comes an even greater responsibility, and that commitment is required to bring your endeavors to a successful completion; d Leadership —a person gains the ability to inspire and constantly teach through their actions and their words; e Time management —a person must prioritize tasks effectively in order to meet deadlines and achieve worthy goals; and f Physical and emotional health —a person learns to recognize the importance of a whole and well-balanced lifestyle.
The listed skill-set was compiled based on previous research of athletes who identified the most desirable skills and confirmed their existence Petitpas et al. Studies have supported the notion that athletes who capitalize on transferable skills are more likely to experience successful change between athletic and non-athletic settings Blinde and Greendorfer, Collegiate coaches and administrators are always searching for an athletic edge, while faculty and admission offices are actively searching for the same type of academic excellence—prowess in the field is not only for sports, it is also for academics which takes many hours of mental agility, study, and hard work, skills not thought of in reference to Scholar-Athletes.
The current academic-athletic rift is now in the process of widening on U. This contentious mindset starts with a limited and distorted view regarding what young people see as the pathway to success.
The Scholar-Athlete skill sets that empower young people to achieve successful careers and make meaningful professional contributions to society. Advancing the knowledge of what a Scholar-Athlete is, goes beyond sport-minded individuals who want to pursue careers in the sciences, the humanities and all other fields. The Scholar-Athlete's scholastic work, agility of mind, and many hours of studying lends itself toward achievement in any workplace.
This professional skill set that the Scholar-Athlete possesses is powerful enough to achieve success in any career or field of study. A Scholar-Athlete is someone who is committed to improving themselves while participating in a sport Segelken, This definition crosses all perceived boundaries of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and social and economic status.
The Cambrdige Dictionary's definition of a scholar is a person who has a great knowledge, usually in one subject—the individual studied a great deal in one area.
At a fundamental level, all Scholars are in an ongoing quest for knowledge and understanding. Since we are creatures of habit, our daily routines are made up of repetitive practices that automatically produce behaviors for success Wiest, If our approaches seem to be working, we keep using them, while if they fail, we stop using them.
As a result, the scholar-athletes themselves define and shape how they are evaluated as different individually in gender, creed, class, and race; but equal as athletes within society Axtell, Much like the traits of a Scholar, the Athlete finds their identity in their daily routine, which includes multiple periods of time set aside to train, practice or compete in their chosen sport. Just as Scholars are careful in how they systematically approach a topic of study, so too does an Athlete carefully consider and study behavioral aspects, such as diet, nutrition, hydration, exercise and performance.
The common televised perception of an Athlete is that of a person in an organization including the Olympics and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Athletes are also people recognized and respected on the streets of our communities and in parks, local schools, recreational clubs, and neighborhood courts. The societal concept of both Scholars and Athletes need to be fundamentally reframed and redefined to be viewed as equivalently respected and understood.
These need to become familiar action words used every day to describe an active person who is fully engaged in holistically advancing their personal and professional future. It is important to note that previous academic research has presented a significantly different definition that is less inclusive and carries socially divisive definitions for Scholars and Athletes, respectively.
They see Scholars exclusively as those who achieve the highest grades and therefore fall into the socially defined norm of academic prestige and resulting social stratification Snyder and Spreitzer, As another example, Axtell further associates a Scholar as a high achieving student who is older, arguing that true Scholars mature slowly regarding their depth of understanding. Axtell further proports, without evidence, that the social environment of the Scholar is exclusively in the college or university setting, and even here it can only be achieved in graduate school.
This redefinition of a Scholar-Athlete links directly to previously established understandings for how individual students establish their own personal identity Jones and McEwen, In the present topic, their basic model called Multidimensions of Identity has been applied to Scholar-Athletes with respect to their: a. Academic Identity; b. Athlete Identity; c. Social Identity; and d. Gender Identity Jones and McEwen, This conceptualization draws from understandings of what Athletes have to endure throughout their lives while incorporating the overall complex series of events involved in Scholar identity development.
Scholar-Athletes have additional demands imposed by their sports, which create considerable challenges to student life Jolly, Research by Schlossberg identified another theoretical model that can be related to any individual that is going through identity transitioning, such as degree or career shifts, that leads to a modification in one's behavior and relationship. Throughout the complex transitional process, Schlossberg suggested that the individual's adaptation to the identity transition is dependent on three factors: a Biological and social factors specific to the individual, such as gender, age, socio-economic status, culture, and religious beliefs; b Situational factors, is the individual in control of the decision to transition or is it forced; and c Pre-transition and post-transition environmental factors, does the individual have enough internal and external support from family or outside agencies.
Schlossberg's model suggests these three factors influence one's ability to identify and adapt to various life events. Such great awareness of transferable skills by Scholar-Athletes also supports the theoretical research of Danish et al. The LDI model identifies a similar process specific to athletes and the factors that play into athletic career retirement and the acquirement of transferable skills from sport.
Basic principles of the LDI, growth and change, are imperative for human development Danish et al. Awareness of transferable skills leads to an awareness of how such skills were developed.
College sports have increasingly become a popular form of mass commercial entertainment Gerdy, Many elite high school athletes are seen on ESPN signing their national letter of intent, which is an NCAA document committing them to play at a specific institution. The primary purpose of higher education, which is to prepare individuals to make lifelong productive contributions to society, is overlooked far too often. As the popularity and social status of sport continues to rise, middle school and high school institutions are now facing the challenge of addressing an increasing lack of academic productivity among some student groups Bowen and Levin, When athletic performance is more important than academic success, cultural perceptions then become more important than educational programs.
The high ground needs to be retaken in order to challenge and transform the Student-Athlete's courage and vision for their own future. For many young people in our neighborhood communities and schools, the path to success is seen solely through athletics Taylor, This mindset now shapes how young people view the future.
Structural and cultural factors, such as upward economic mobility, gender identity, media and street social interactions have an overwhelming influence on a young person's aspirations and expectations to pursue a professional career in sports Baker et al. The present study calls for a basic recasting of these perceptions, including instilling in young people the viewpoints that: a all athletes are scholars; b most athletes should pursue academics over athletics as their primary future pathway toward achieving professional and economic success; c all Athletes should consider their athletic ability as only one component of multiple dynamic dimensions of their identity; and d all Athletes must consider themselves active scholarly participants in learning rather than passive uninvolved bystanders in the educational process.
Our media and communities are saturated with individuals who have used their trained athletic skill-set to break down barriers of the status quo of race, class, gender as it relates to the Scholar-Athlete to become successful in professions other than sports. President Ford born July 14, in Omaha, Nebraska where his mother divorced his father just days after he was born and lived a few years as a single parent. Ford developed a love for football and attended the University of Michigan — where he played center, linebacker, and long snapper for the football team and helped lead the Wolverines to two undefeated seasons and back to back national titles in and After college he had an extremely successful career in politics and eventually served as the 38th President of the United States from to Greene, Earvin developed a love for basketball at a young age and attended Michigan State University in East Lansing where he led the Spartans to a National Title during the —79 season.
Magic was drafted first overall in and played professional basketball as a point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers from to where he won five NBA championships. Shannon Miller was born March 10th, in Rolla, Missouri. Even though gymnastics as a sport was not popular amongst youth especially girls, Shannon's parents decided to get her involved at the early age of five and soon had her traveling all over the world. Conversely, participation in athletics made several contributions to my scholarship.
The first was that from basketball, one of the quintessential team sports, I learned something about the functional importance and aesthetic beauty of teamwork, the pulling together and subordination of self for the good of the whole.
I also learned, sometimes painfully, that long-range success—the winning of a game at the end of 40 minutes of play or a championship season—is the product of steady, patient, incremental, coordinated effort, not of Technicolor bursts of individual heroics.
Intercollegiate track taught a slightly different lesson but one equally valuable for participation in the scholarly community. While track is a team sport, except for the relays the events are separate and individualized. The analogy to scholarship is rather exact. While scholars work for the cumulative, long-range good of their international community by advancing knowledge and understanding, they do so largely alone, teaching students and publishing books and articles under a single name.
Another scholarly application I brought from athletics was that I at least realized the need, from facing a variety of superior opponents, to mask or sublimate my intense competitiveness.
The object was three-fold: to gain some psychological advantage over the opponent on the principle that a secret or at least quiet nemesis is harder to handle than a known one, to focus my mental and physical energy upon the task rather than the person at hand, and, not least, to provide a quiet escape in the event of failure.
But the other two have a good deal of utility. If scholarship is to remain disinterested and focused on the communal search for truth, it must stay above personalities and personal animus an ideal that scholars, no less than other competitive people, often honor in the breach. In one important way competition in scholarship differs from athletic competition.
The search for personal excellence in humanistic scholarship as opposed to scientific research, perhaps does not take the overtly competitive form of athletics. The major difference is that excellence in athletics is usually measured during the performance by objective standards—times run, distances jumped, strike-outs, birdies, aces—although a few sports, such as diving and gymnastics, are highly evaluative and therefore subjective and political.
Excellence in scholarship, on the other hand, is measured almost entirely by the subjective judgments of peers over much longer periods.
There are, to be sure, some public awards and rewards in scholarship, the publicity for which has the effect of cozening us into believing that they were made by objective judges applying objective standards. Anyone who has served on a selection panel or prize committee knows how fraudulent such an interpretation must be. But most media consumers, even scholars and teachers who should know better, are easily taken in by the superficial resemblance between a literary prize, an endowed chair, or a fellowship award and the outcome of a sports event.
In athletics, particularly team sports, there are losers and winners at the end of each contest. A career in sports also gave me a somewhat accelerated education in human nature through observing the behavior of people under pressure, handling success and failure on a regular basis, and having to motivate themselves day after day to train hard, suffer a certain amount of pain in the process, and neglect a whole raft of alternative ways to spend their time.
I saw many well-muscled embodiments of that old cliche about quitters never winning and winners never quitting. Perseverance has as much value in scholarship as in sports. Frequently in our business, writing lots is the best revenge. I also observed at Yale two master motivators at work. Frank Ryan, a psychologist, wasted none of his discipline in applying its principles to his student-charges who were not self-starters.
His authority was not diminished by his Irish gift of gab and his imposing physique, which formerly threw the hammer and put the shot at championship distances. Bob Giegengack got more out of his runners than any coach I have ever seen, partly because it was well known that he always had. Not given to light banter or sophomoric nonsense I remember being pulverized in an ethics debate in his car en route to a meet at Cornell , Gieg motivated his teams by the force of his knowledge of and the seriousness of his commitment to the sport.
His mordant wit and withering sense of irony, accented with the peculiar lilt of Brooklyn, added to his authority, as did his ubiquitous whistle. I got to study the human condition in its largely collegiate manifestations also by traveling with the team to a variety of cites, countries, and campuses. By virtue of scheduling the meets were held every other year and a bit of luck, I competed as a sophomore in the United States, as a senior in Great Britain, and again for Oxbridge as a second-year graduate student back in the States.
I have no idea what they might suggest I should study. What I enjoyed most about the English teams was their intellectual seriousness, their maturity, and their earnest amateur spirit. Several members were active graduate students, as I was.
Most were visibly older than their American counterparts and thought nothing of recovering from practice with a pipe and a pint of stout. Their one coach was relatively unobtrusive and certainly not interested in making nightly bed-checks. The club spirit reigned and provided a refreshing contrast with the semiprofessional feel of many American college teams. Athletics abetted my scholarship in another way: they made me, in spite of my early academic record, a plausible candidate for a Rhodes and other scholarships for study abroad.
Unfortunately, I was too dull-witted or tongue-tied in the final interviews to win a Rhodes. But reaching the finals in a tough region apparently did me no harm when the Yale faculty awarded two fellowships for graduate study a couple of anxious months later. These took us to Cambridge for two years. Winning a Rhodes would have put a handsome cap on my dual career, but some disappointments work out for the best. As Peter Dawkins had discovered a couple of years before, only third-year Rhodes were allowed to marry.
Perhaps the most important legacy I received from athletics was a basic reservoir of confidence which would continue to sustain me as I tried to gain my footing in the slippery new arena of scholarship.
Having held my own against athletic rivals in two sports on two continents however small the pieces , I was emboldened to try my hand at a different, more serious, kind of competition in the big league of international scholarship. That sustaining core of confidence came, I like to think, as much from knowing how to lose with some grace, from learning that losing and disappointment are not in the long run fatal and can even be salutary if they lead to regrouping and redoubling of effort, as from having triumphed now and again.
Set a Timer. For those aspects of your daily schedule that you alone can control, make sure that your productivity schedule is complete with a designated number of minutes per activity. Invest in a stopwatch, or use the timer on a smartphone or computer, to ensure that you move on from one activity to another.
It is quite easy to do well in one activity, and enjoy your progress while doing it, and fail to move on to the next task. Take pleasure in the fact that you are doing well at this one task, but make sure you keep moving down the list when your time is up. The same thing goes for challenging tasks that you'd prefer to quit early, before your designated time is up. In both cases, the timer keeps you honest. Set the timer and stick to it! Academic Buddy System. As a member of a team, you will have teammates who have similar stressors, obligations, assignments, and day-to-day challenges.
While it is important to have friends outside of sports, the individuals on your team know the most about the challenges of being student-athlete. They know intimately the hurdles you face as a member of the same team, so find a way for you both to hold each other accountable in matters both academic and athletic. It is important to succeed in each area, so why not develop some kind of buddy system that helps keep you both on track to meet your daily schedule and short- and long-term goals.
Get to Know Your Professors. As someone who has taught undergraduate students, including a dozen division 1 athletes, I can tell you that it is important to get to know your professors. At the very least, during the first week of classes, be sure to introduce yourself and be open with them about your demanding schedule as a student-athlete.
Better yet, as opposed to approaching them during the hectic moments before or after class, try to attend their office hours early in the semester so you can have a conversation. Throughout the semester, attending a professor's office hours is an excellent way to receive individualized instruction, ask questions, and keep up with course content. Your professors will likely appreciate your hard work, transparency and initiative.
If any issues arise throughout the semester and you need a deadline extension, for example, this may make it easier to ask for help. Bear in mind, your professor is not going to "take it easy" on you because you are an athlete. What you are doing by having an open dialogue with them is showing your desire to be a good student who respects the professor and the class agenda. The takeaway point is that your professor needs to know from the start that you are going to give your very best effort to succeed given the challenging schedule that student-athletes face on a daily basis.
In my experience, those athletes who put forth a serious effort, went to class and attended occasional office hours consistently earned better grades than their fellow athletes who did not. Use School Resources. Lastly, your school has many academic resources designed to help you succeed. For most schools, this includes access to tutoring services, writing help, research assistance, libraries, archives, study groups, technology and software training, job preparation services and public speaking coaches.
You may be able to consult with a tutor online, whether your are on-campus or traveling with the team in another state. These resources are free and you should take advantage of them whenever possible. See All Posts. Shape your future with an online degree Connect with a community of peers, and find a program that will allow you to continue your education in a fast and flexible way.
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