What does it take to be an athlete?
High school athletics has become a year-round sport with constant training, skill development and athletic competition. The purpose for all this is to ultimately earn an athletic scholarship. If you do not put in year-round training to become a superior athlete in your sport you have no chance to earn an athletic scholarship.
Many student athletes believe that they do not have to put the necessary time in to get better therefore, they will under-achieve and receive no scholarship offers.
There are many student athletes that truly suck at their sport and oftentimes they are left wondering why no one is recruiting them or why they did not get any scholarship offers.
An athletic scholarship is a privilege, given only to those athletes who have superior athletic and academic talents. Just remember that there are only so many scholarships per sport to give out in any particular year any way. Student athletes: how many hours are you going to spend in the weight room to gain muscle and strength? How many hours will you put into individual development of your overall game? When the other athlete is up before the sun rises running miles to get better, will you still be sleep? Will you still be just getting out of bed? Will you still be looking for your running shoes or will this be another long list of excuses on why you can’t workout today?
There are high school student athletes who have very little God-given natural talent but, with an incredible work ethic to their sport they somehow over-achieve to get that full athletic scholarship offer. These athletes sometimes get overlooked because they are not very flashy but they still get the job done. Those athletes do not have superior skills athletically but work 10 times harder than the athlete with superior talent and skill.
Student athletes who spends all of their time developing their athletic skills generally are the ones who succeed all through high school, through college and somehow manages to get a professional contract.
I have seen many athletes with great talent athletically, but put very little work into getting better. I have known many of the superior athletes who have reached the highest level that they could reach in their sport but because of their unwillingness to work on their game, they did not stay at the highest level of their sport very long. Those incredibly talented athletes believe that their athletic greatness would somehow sustain them forever. What they did not realize is that everyone at the highest level works on their game every single day so they can stay there at that high level.
The game changes from practice to actually playing in the game. There are those players that look incredibly good in practice, who can do all the drills and who can totally dominate but when the lights are turned on and there’s actually people there to watch them play, those players end up fading out, cracking under the pressure and disappearing totally.
The reason for this is because they did not put the extra time in to develop their confidence; they did not put the extra time in to develop their athletic talents. When it became game time, they realized mentally that they were not ready.
When I was in college at West VirginiaState, all the players on the basketball team were good. Even though I had talent and was 7 feet tall I felt I wasn’t good enough. What I did was find every sort of way to get better.
I would jump rope in the evenings after I studied for the day. On the weekends if we didn’t have practice I would run on the track or run the stadium stairs at the football field. I would get in the weight room and lift weights, I was looking for ways so I could keep up with all of the superior talent we had on my college basketball team. I just went out there and worked very hard every single day and I did not make any excuses. For me it was about the challenge, wondering if I could compete with all of these great players? So I stepped up and faced the challenges head on.
For me personally, it was a daunting task but through it all I kept working hard, I did not give up and most importantly, I did not quit. Many of my college teammates could not handle the day to day pressures of being a college athlete. The weaker ball players crumbled under the pressure and ultimately quit the team. I’m sure no matter what they did throughout their lives they were always a quitter.
The reason so many athletes suck is because of their unwillingness to push themselves athletically, farther than they’ve ever been pushed in their entire lives.
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