Playing a sport competitively and keeping up with your grades in school can prove to be a daunting task. On one side your coach demands your undivided commitment, your teachers feel like school should be your number one priority, meanwhile your parents want you to just magically juggle both so you can get into a great University on a sports scholarship. Here are eight tips that can make the balancing act between school and soccer possible:
- Keep your smartphone away. Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, iMessage, Twitter… and the list could go on forever. Procrastination has become ever-so-easy with the domination of smartphones in our lives. The average kid spends over 53 hours per week on media; that’s an average of 7.5 hours per day![1] Put your phone on airplane mode while you study, and stick to glancing at it only when you’re taking a well-deserved break.
- Schedule Everything. Sports teach us a discipline we would otherwise not have in our teen years. Time management is everything when you want to be a star of the soccer team and maintain the grades necessary to play it in college. Keep a calendar on your desk or your phone, and schedule your classes, practices, study sessions and downtime.
- Stick to the Schedule. Even worse than not creating a schedule is creating one and not using it! Ensure you follow your agenda and/or calendar from the start or straying off it will become a habit.
- Communicate with your coach & teachers. Be transparent and try to establish a good working relationship with your coach and teachers. A good relationship with them will help them better understand what you’re dealing with. This could easily translate to some benefits like: extended deadlines or alternative practice times.
- Seek help. Classmates, teachers, tutors, and teammates. Help can compliment your learning process and skill improvement both within the classroom and on the field.
- Stay Ahead. This may sound extremely far-fetched but if you start early, staying ahead is not just a possibility but quite an achievable one. As soon as you skip a practice, or miss a homework assignment playing the catch-up game becomes increasingly hard, especially if you are trying to juggle between a competitive sport and your academic life.
- Take advantage of spare time. If you have free periods in school, use them wisely to stay up-to-date with your lessons or even get ahead. Make sure any free time you have in school is spent wisely, as this means less work to take home later.
- Reward Yourself. Don’t forget to reward yourself! Go out with friends, enjoy family night, or binge on Netflix every now and then. Not giving yourself a break will further stress you and is not fun.
[1] The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, http://kff.org/other/event/generation-m2-media-in-the-lives-of/
