Playing sports at any level teaches a person a whole series of lessons above and beyond just the skills required to compete in any one particular sport. Especially as a competitive high school and collegiate athlete, it is easy to get caught up in the conditioning, early morning and late-night practices, traveling, and repetitive drills and skill building that goes into mastering your sport, without really understanding the life skills that you learn along the way. I’m lucky enough to be over eight years removed from my last college volleyball game and have gained the true perspective of what I learned by being a competitive athlete. The list of things I’ve learned through my life as an athlete is a long one, but most of them are lessons that I didn’t even realize I was learning until after my competitive playing years were over.
The reality of being an athlete is that you will dedicate countless hours to training, practicing, and traveling, and the higher the level you compete at, the more hours you will spend in the gym. Some high school athletes experience this in the form of playing multiple sports for their high school and/or playing club or travel in the off season. Once you get to a collegiate level, you are training and practicing year-round with long travel days during the season, all while going to school and possibly working part time on top of it. It is said often, but it is the truth – it is like having 2 full time jobs. But through being this busy all of the time and having so much that you need to accomplish in a finite number of hours, athletes perfect the art of multitasking. You learn to juggle more tasks than you ever thought was possible, and how to devote enough attention to each one to avoid letting any suffer. This is quite possibly the most important life lesson that I learned through being a competitive athlete and I think it is one that is invaluable in life after college.
Throughout years of playing sports with different teammates and coaches, you are also bound to encounter nearly every type of personality type imaginable. You quickly realize that every person is motivated and inspired in different ways and by different tactics. There will always be relationships that are easier to build and maintain and ones that are much more difficult and take more work. Regardless of how well you get along with a teammate, trainer, or coach, you are all put together on one unit to accomplish the same goal: to achieve as much success in your sport as you possibly can. This can be a difficult lesson to learn and one that take a lot of time and practice, but it is applicable to whatever you decide to do in life after college. At some point in your adult life you will be either in a group led by a person that you don’t agree with or you will be in charge of a group of people who all have different personalities and need to be managed in different ways. It is in this situation that former athletes are miles ahead of everyone else in the room because we have been doing this our whole life on every team we have been a part of, and we have developed a bag of tricks to help us navigate dealing with challenging personalities.
You will learn many lessons throughout your life as a competitive athlete and the art of multitasking and managing different personalities are just two of them. However, one of the best gifts that athletics gives you is the relationships and friendships that you form along the way. The teammates and coaches that you spend countless hours with become your family and most of them will leave a lasting impression on your life. The best gifts that you will get from life as an athlete are lifelong friendships with former coaches, trainers, and teammates from all levels of your playing career.
– Erin Pence, 15 Silver Assistant Coach
