For student-athletes, time demands present challenges

In an effort to reduce the time demands on NCAA student-athletes, Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott is traveling to all of the schools in the conference to meet with student-athletes from various sports about their concerns.

He visited USC — the fifth campus on his trip — last Friday, and yet, he hasn’t spoken to a single baseball player.

“I don’t think we’ve met any baseball players yet because on every campus — they’re out playing a game somewhere,” Scott said.

It turns out even arranging a time to talk about time demands is a challenge. Indeed, as he was talking, the baseball team was playing in the second game of a three-game series at UC Santa Barbara. While Scott was meeting with a group of USC student-athletes on Friday afternoon, six different athletic teams had competitions. Four of them — including baseball — were on road trips that ranged from Seattle, Washington, for men’s tennis to Atlanta, Georgia, for men’s swimming.

Student-athletes from eight teams did make it to the meeting at the John McKay Center, where Scott and Erik Price, the Pac-12 associate commissioner of compliance, had an open dialogue with the student-athletes regarding the rigorous schedules that they face. They discussed proposals that will be brought up during the NCAA convention in January 2017.

Kamali Houston, a senior on the rowing team and the president of the Trojan Athletic Senate, said it was a productive meeting.

“We had a very open and honest conversation about time demands and what’s going on in our daily lives,” Houston said.

NCAA rules limit student-athletes to 20 hours of practice a week; yet, a study conducted in April 2015 of Pac-12 athletes found that, on average, they are spending 50 hours a week on athletics during the season. A majority of those hours are spent traveling to competitions in addition to receiving treatment and other “voluntary” hours.

Scott said he just recently learned from student-athletes of the term “prehab,” which are exercises to prevent injury.

“I’ve got a much more full appreciation for the time commitments around actual practices,” Scott said. “What it takes to get ready before practice to make sure you don’t injure yourself, and in the limited practice time you have, you can get the most out of it — then the rehab, the strength and conditioning. There’s so much more that goes into being an elite athlete than just the practice time and the travel time.”

For student-athletes, it is difficult to balance the time spent on the sport with time in the classroom. But, with the NCAA insisting the “student” come before the “athlete” in the title, they have an obligation in making sure academics come first. Just 2 percent of NCAA student-athletes receive a scholarship out of high school for athletics, and only 2 percent of those student-athletes turn pro after college. A NCAA recruiting pamphlet from August 2014 explicitly states, “In reality, most student-athletes depend on academics to prepare them for life after college,” creating a dilemma between how time should be split between academics and athletics.

“How do you balance [the focus on athletics], respect that and give them everything that they might want there, but also recognize that most student-athletes here are not going to be professional athletes and not going to compete afterward?” Scott said. “They’ve got this amazing opportunity for a USC degree and access to amazing faculty. [We want] to make sure that they’ve got enough time and flexibility to fully take advantage of that.”

Yet, many student-athletes find themselves falling behind in classes because of the large time commitment to athletics. The same 2015 survey found that 54 percent of Pac-12 student-athletes do not have enough time to study for tests and 80 percent missed a class for competition during the 2014-2015 academic year.

Scott added that the lack of availability of training facilities on campuses forced students to miss class in order to train.

“That’s a direct result of the amount of resource that’s being applied to the facilities and the staff that’s available to help student-athletes,” Scott said.

Road trips take a toll as well. A majority of teams have road trips during the week, which takes away from class time and adds to the stress of the already high-pressure life of being a Division I athlete.

Scott pointed to basketball as an example, and USC’s men’s basketball team can certainly attest to that. The Trojans finished 3-7 on the road last season and the scheduling may have been an indirect cause. They took three separate road trips while school was in session to Oregon, Arizona and the Bay Area, played two games in each stop, and lost all six of them.

Following a blowout loss at Cal on Feb. 28, a Sunday night, head coach Andy Enfield talked about the hardships of being on the road.

“In this league, it is very difficult to win on the road, especially when you’re sitting around in the hotel for five days,” Enfield said. “These are challenging road trips where you go on the road for five days. Now we’ve got to fly back and [the players have] got to be in class on Monday morning at 8 a.m. The road is very challenging.”

While both sides acknowledge the issues at hand, there hasn’t been a clear-cut solution to fixing the problem. Scott noted that student-athletes don’t necessarily want to cut back on the “voluntary” hours they spend on the sport outside of practice because they want to avoid injuries and stay sharp. He was unwilling to commit to adjusting the actual competition schedules, although he admitted the scheduling made the “biggest impact” on time demands and left open those changes as a possibility.

Houston proposed an idea of mandating a 12-hour break after competitions for rest and recovery.

“Scheduling, making sure that coaches are open and transparent with the schedule and athletes are ready to expect what’s going to happen with their week and can plan ahead,” Houston said as another talking point in the meeting.

Still, there are only so many hours in a day. Seventy-one percent of Pac-12 student-athletes reported that athletic commitments kept them from sufficient sleep, and the ugly truth remains that being a student-athlete means signing up for a time-crunched collegiate career.

“Given the commitment of being an elite student athlete, if you’re going to do a great job academically and you’re going to compete at the highest level, there’s very little time for anything else,” Scott said.