The University of Oklahoma is notorious for athletics according to US News: Education Colleges, and is heavily populated with student athletes. Most of the athletes at OU are on a full ride scholarship, but in order to maintain these scholarships, they must devote their lives to their sport.
A social problems student, Chelsea Luster, explained how the athletes at OU are often handed things and how they are pretty much being paid to play whichever sport they were recruited to play and receive way too many free things. In a class discussion about student athletes, much of the non-athletes seemed angry because the athletes in the class spent the majority of the discussion talking about how "hard" their lives are.
Kayla Nowak is a gymnast at OU and I spoke with her to see what a day in the life of an athlete is really like and how she felt about the stereotypes of student athletes.
Her day starts at 5:45 am with morning workouts and then she goes to class. After class, she heads to practice for about 3 hours and then has a little bit of a break. She then has tutoring from 7 pm to 8 pm. This leaves her with about 2 hours to study and do homework if she wants a sufficient amount of sleep before her day starts all over again. In a sense, the academic life of a student athlete is just as difficult as that of a regular student. Regular students get to spend their entire nights studying or get to go home and take naps during the day. Athletes are constantly going and don't get to have their nap times or pull all nighters for a test.
In regards to the stereotypes of student athletes Kayla says "I wouldn't say we just get handed free stuff... yeah we all complain about how tired we are... but it's a lot of hard work and it's very time consuming. It does get overwhelming sometimes." She says there's no way she would have time for a job because essentially, gymnastics is her job.
Nowak loves what she does and she says she wouldn't trade in her student athlete life even when times get to be stressful. She explained how she and the rest of the gymnastics team still have their summer breaks even though they're still training, they get to hang out like normal students.
She's excited for the season to come and says how this is probably the hardest part and it only gets easier from here on out in regards to the upcoming season.
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