“We spend seven hours in the rain wearing garbage bags over uniforms, school logo tattoos peeling off wet cheeks and biceps, muddy shoes, matted hair. Then we all crowd into the gym at Villanova, where trash cans overflow with food wrappers, banana peels, plastic bottles, vomit-soaked paper towels.” That was just two of 56 final exams squeezed in on this road trip, taken between meets, taken in a little conference room at the end of the hall of banquet rooms at the hotel in Philadelphia. I’m one of Marquette’s academic advisers serving 314 student-athletes.
Maureen Lewis is assistant director for academic services in the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics and a wonderful writer who often posts on Medium.
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ll NCAA Division I teams provide academic support in the form of a mandatory study hall or study table, tutor centers and a staff of advisers to help student-athletes negotiate the sometimes-clashing demands of school, practice, travel and competition. When the track team’s travel overlaps with final exam week, I join them on the road. This time my carry-on bag is loaded with exams in subjects ranging from anthropology to philosophy. Athletes are responsible for alerting instructors when they will miss exams due to sports travel. They have options to take exams early or have them proctored at nontraditional exam times, like in a hotel suite when they’re on the road. Every one of the 72 student-athletes who traveled to Philadelphia for the Big East Conference meet last May had at least one exam conflict to resolve.
Most of the college teams competing in Philadelphia were doing the same thing: balancing final exams with the championship chase. Villanova made its academic center available for us to scan exams and send them back to professors on our home campuses. We also used the local copy shop and the hotel business office. It’s our goal to get every exam completed before the meet begins so that our student-athletes can be just competitors. We hustle to make it happen. Sometimes at track meets, you see student-athletes from opposing teams help each other up from the ground or congratulate one another on a great performance. Those of us who work in academics do that, too. We walk together to the copy shop from the practice field; we scan and fax from offices at the gym. Do you have a stapler, tape, a Sharpie, paperclips? Go, team. At this meet Day One is pretty successful. A number of our athletes advance to the finals that will be held tomorrow. We feel positive, some medals are already won, and records and bestperformances already logged. We’re all hungry. Our team is too big to take one place for dinner, so we pull up to King of Prussia Mall and descend on the food court. Georgetown and DePaul have the same idea. An all-athlete conga line snakes around Chipotle, different team names on multicolored uniforms but the same post-meet hunger being sated. Day Two dawns with a dismal forecast: 100 percent chance of rain all day. I spot Amy at breakfast. She jokes that for the first time in the last three days she doesn’t get to sit in a room with me for three hours. She laughs and says, “If you see me on the track today in the rain, it’s just rain, I’m not crying.” Later in the day, I try to remember that lighthearted breakfast. By mid-day, we feel a gut punch when one of the fastest guys on our men’s 4 x 100 relay, the team going for a national-qualifying time, the guy who broke school records in four meets in a row this season, pulls a hamstring on the far turn. He makes the hand-off but has to be helped off the track. Unbelievably something similar happens in the 100-meter dash, when a second athlete from that relay team pulls a hamstring on the straightaway
REPORT CARD Men’s golf, men’s tennis and women’ cross country performed among the nation’s elite
in the classroom, according to the latest Academic Progress Rate released by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The APR is an annual scorecard of academic achievement calculated for all Division I sports teams. The teams were each recognized for posting scores in the top 10 percent of their respective sport.
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