Student Athletes Are Unicorns

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Recommended: Academic performance and sports

A successful student-athlete is like a unicorn: they’re rare and magical in action. They somehow achieve outstanding sports results, stay at the top of their classes, and have a vibrant social life. You can usually find them in one of three places: in class, their athletic location of preference, or the cafeteria. Successful student-athletes often have convoluted concepts of sleep. If they’re not waking up at the crack of dawn for morning practice, they’re pulling all nighters to finish an essay. Somehow, through some miracle, they hand in their assignment on time and run off to a practice somewhere. This situation was common at my previous high-school, which had a high performance program for elite athletes. When I was a grade 9 in the HP program, I was in awe of the grade 12 students who managed to balance their hectic lives so effortlessly. But as I got older, I realized that not all of my fellow high-performer student-athletes were unicorns There’s a word us student-athletes use to describe people who have a normal school day, and don’t play a competitive sport: norms. Perhaps it’s out of some sort of hidden resentment for a “normal” life that didn’t revolve around practice and …show more content…

The hockey players tended to form their own group separate from all the other sports, the synchronized swimmers and speed swimmers formed their own group, and the water polo players preferred to integrated more with the regular students than the other high performers. Regardless, high-performers had a closer relationship with fellow high-performers than the rest of the student body. We usually had lunch classes with the same group of people for all four years of school, had lockers in the same hallway, and probably waited in the same line together for a meeting with the notoriously difficult to find high-performer

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