Dual Sport Athlete

My dual sport experience has been almost perfect. My freshman year I played in most of the football games. Did not appear in two of them. I was redshirted in basketball. My sophomore season I broke my collarbone in the fourth game after starting all four of the games. The bright side of my injury was getting to play basketball and not having to wait all year to compete again. I also received a medical redshirt for football. Football is a game of a lot of strategy and game planning with one game a week. The anticipation of game day helps fuel the fire. The game is played at a very high pace for short amounts of time. Washburn's offense wants to play at a faster pace to catch the defense of guard or tire them out. Being able to slow the game down between the high pace of plays is a crucial ability. Basketball is almost the total opposite. The game is played fast. The season is even fast. The basketball season has twice as many games and play two games a week most of the season. T...

Most people do not understand the amount of work college athletes have to put into their craft to be successful. No matter the level of competition; division 1, 2 or 3, NAIA or community college. All college athletes know it is a completely different level than high school. For some athletes the change might not be as great as others possibly because of the size of school. The bigger the high school, the more competition for spots on a team. I did not go to a large high school and I was gifted enough to show up on game day and be able to play at a high level. Having the ability in high school to show up and dominate is how high school athletes get noticed by colleges. Once a player is recruited and shows up the first day of practice in college it is eye opening. Most, if not all the players, are athletically gifted, have a passion for the game, and are ready to compete. That is my favorite part. In high school some of the players are just there to enjoy time with friends or their par...

Obviously while playing two sports a lot of my time is consumed by athletics. The only real problem that is created is that I have zero free time. To help with time management most athletes are enrolled in only 12 credit hours a semester. The football coaches like to keep time open for meetings and obviously practice, so in the fall I have mostly morning classes and occasionally a night class. From lunch to around 5 is football time. During basketball I gain an extra hour because the basketball team does not have a lot of extra meetings. A personal problem I have with being busy most of the day is when I finally get home it is hard for me to get motivated to do school work. Then I remember having to go to the library for study hall hours my first semester here and it motivates me. After the first semester you do not have to go to study hall as long as you have good enough grades. My time management during my first spring semester was not very good. I was right back in study hall th...

Spring football is when the team can practice in full pads. The main purpose of spring ball is to learn or become more familiar with the offense or defense. In my case I just worry about the offense. It is a big time for the younger players to show the coaches what they can do on the field and see how they could possibly look like running out team schemes. Along with learning the play book, it is an opportunity to practice skills and polish up others. The spring ball practices can vary when and what kind of practice. There are three different kinds of practices; helmet, shells, and full. Helmet practices are when we just wear helmets, shells is when we wear shoulder pads and helmet, and full is football pants and full pads. A normal practice is arranged to have a little bit of special teams time, kickers kick, and returns catch them. An individual position segment, I play wide receiver, so we work on footwork on routes and blocking. We also work on routes and different drills to wo...

The basketball off season starts soon after spring football and about month after the basketball season. Basketball off season is similar to off season for football, the main focus is making improvements to your game and your body. The basketball team lifts four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I personally like having Wednesdays off. Football has the same schedule in the summer time. Along with weights the team will normally organize pick up after weights on Mondays. Tuesdays there is skilled work and weights following. There are all sorts of rules regarding the amount of hours a week coaches can actually work with the players. So we have skill work twice a week, Thursdays are the other day of the week. Skill work is exactly how it sounds; we work on ball handling, shooting, passing, footwork for different things and end it with guard specific work and post player specific work. During the spring I do not have a ton of over lap with football and basketball worko...

There are two, what you could call, off seasons for football. The first off season is winter break, unfortunately I am playing basketball during that time so that one does not apply to me. Once winter break is over the team starts morning conditioning and weights up until spring football. So the winter off season goes from the end of the football season to the end of winter break. The main off season I am a part of is the one that starts ofter spring football is over. I will talk more about spring ball in another post. It starts after spring ball and goes all the way up to the beginning of fall camp in August, so basically the summer time. Weights and conditioning is a big part of the summer for football. The team runs on the field at 6:10 in the morning and then directly after go to the weight room to lift. The is the schedule four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. We get the weekends and Wednesday off. There is also a week break during the summer. The foo...