Day in the life: A rough playing field

By the time his football meetings wrapped up at 8 a.m., he was already well into his day as a starting quarterback, before his obligations as a student had begun.

After a day of classes, 4:30 p.m. brought a three-hour practice. Wornham ended his day with homework in the evening, before heading to bed to recharge for the next day. Then he did it all again.

“It’s all I have ever known since I have been here,” Wornham, who broke his collarbone Oct. 16 and missed the rest of the season, said of his routine as a student athlete.

Wornham’s daily ritual is familiar to roughly 18 percent of undergraduate students: It is yet another day in the life of a Princeton varsity athlete.

For the roughly 930 varsity athletes at Princeton, schedules are strictly segmented between meetings, practices, classes and meals. Since getting a good night’s sleep is fundamental to athletic performance, fitting in even these priorities can be daunting. Schoolwork is sometimes pushed aside and extracurricular and social lives are marginalized, particularly in season.

Sports lack the flexibility of most other activities like clubs and volunteering, so many athletes compartmentalize their academic and athletic lives in order to balance the fundamentals. While they sometimes must fit in homework on a road trip or worry about their playbook during precept, athletes generally attempt to keep these obligations as distinct as possible.

Dozens of interviews conducted over the last several months have shown that unlike those at some large Division I programs, student-athletes at Princeton are serious about their roles as both students and athletes.

“I think you have to go through the time commitment to see how much it really is,” said Sasha Sherry ’11, a defender on the women’s hockey team. “I don’t think people really understand,” she added.

After nearly two decades with the men’s crew — as a lightweight rower, assistant coach, lightweight head coach and now heavyweight head coach — Greg Hughes ’96 has come to believe that many of the complaints he hears from his team about the intensity of training are overstated.

“For kids that are rowing, they often try to justify their time in the boathouse by making it sound like they’re basically slaves to the sport, to make everybody think they’re tough,” he explained.

While Hughes noted that “they are tough kids, there’s no question,” he touched on an apparent paradox of Princeton athletics that characterizes a day in the life of a Tiger athlete: While athletes may regularly lament the intensity of their demands, they are consistently able to balance their team commitments with academic obligations and social lives.

The students he works with are driven in all aspects of their lives, he said.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“We see it in academics, we see it in athletics, and to be quite honest, you see it in social lives, too,” Hughes explained. “How many times do you see some kid who’s like, ‘Tonight’s my night to go out. I’m going to go out 120 percent’? I think we have those kinds of kids. And that’s part of what allows us to have kids that are successful athletically and academically.”

Unlike virtually every other student on campus, the majority of athletes were recruited — and some even feel they were admitted — expressly to perform in their sport. Some athletes said they consequently feel a unique sense of obligation to their commitments outside the classroom.

“A lot of times, people don’t realize the time constraints that playing a sport puts on you,” Noel Gonzales-Luna ’10, who was a second baseman on the baseball team, said in an interview in April. “Everyone sees the games, which are lots of fun — definitely what you do it for. But you’re basically working a full-time job and doing everything else.”

Tyler Fiorito ’12, the men’s lacrosse team’s starting goalie, voiced a similar sentiment. “When you come here and play one sport only, it feels more like a job,” he noted. “You’re constantly doing the same thing over and over again, and you never get a break.”

Getting a full night’s sleep can be particularly challenging for those rising earliest.

Gonzales-Luna explained that early-morning workouts were particularly tough. “Our coach [Scott Bradley] stresses mental toughness, so in the fall we choose the early slots in the gym. We’re getting up at 5:00, 5:30, 6:00 a.m. multiple times a week, and it wears at you,” he said. “You don’t get the good kind of sleep.”

Sherry echoed Gonzales-Luna’s point. “I definitely sacrifice getting enough sleep at night, which hurts my training,” she said. Sherry explained that while she does complete her homework, it’s “definitely not in the manner that I’d like to.”

“[If I didn’t] have to go out every Saturday, I [still] wouldn’t get enough sleep,” Sherry said. “And not getting enough sleep affects training, and you’re more prone to sickness.”

Many in-season athletes spend up to every other weekend on the road. Away trips can be even more complicated than life on campus when it comes to finding time to do schoolwork, and they prevent athletes from socializing in circles beyond their teammates altogether while away.

“When we’re on the road, for instance, on a Friday, we wake up at 9:00 and have a breakfast, and then have an hour and a half to two hours to work,” Sherry said.

“Then we have our pregame meal, then pregame skate as well, and by the time you go to the rink, get dressed, skate, get off — you basically have three hours to work if you want to,” she continued. However, Sherry said that she nonetheless fits in her work while on the road to stay afloat in her classes. But making time for other activities is less of a priority for athletes.

The University specifically bars classes from being held between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. in order to accommodate sports and other extracurricular activities. In theory, this means student-athletes can complete their daily practice in a timely manner and have ample time in the evening to finish their schoolwork.

Some officials think this practice of reserving that time slot serves its function well. “That [time] is pretty sacred, and it’s there for every student to take advantage of something else on campus and to do it to their fullest without feeling that they’ve sacrificed anything else,” Hughes said. “You might be doing a sport at 4:30, but I think a lot of kids are doing some pretty impressive things at 4:30 at Princeton.”

But practice schedules nonetheless make it quite difficult for students to fit in any activities beyond school and sport.

“I wouldn’t say it’s depressing, but it’s a little disheartening,” said Sherry, an ecology and evolutionary biology major. “There’s lots of lectures I’d like to go to, [like] people speaking in my department. There are different clubs I would’ve liked to go into, but [it would be] like, there’s another thing for another few hours per week [that] I’d have to manage.”

Kareem Maddox ’11, a forward and co-captain on the men’s basketball team, has dabbled in extracurricular activities in the past and said that athletes can participate in such activities if they make them a priority. Maddox has been a member of the debate team and has written for The Daily Princetonian’s news section.

“It’s always tough, I guess,” Maddox admitted. “Pretty much all your free time comes after 7:30, so it’s hard to find time for stuff, but you can generally get it done if you put your mind to it.”

Many athletes said they simply spend far too much time on their sport to even consider other activities. Membership in eating clubs is an exception, though athletes said their time constraints sometimes preclude them from the full club experience. Practice time often directly conflicts with primetime for dinner at eating clubs.

“We have practice from 4:30 to 7:00, we get back to the locker room and shower, then you walk up to catch dinner,” Fiorito explained. “I haven’t [tried] Cottage [Club] yet, but 8:00 might be cutting it close. Last year [the team] did Wu until 8:15, then it’s studying.”

Sherry, who joined Cap & Gown Club this fall, said that she has not been able to take full advantage of the club so far. “I’ve been meeting new people, and the club experience is something I want, to be there all the time. I want to spend one-and-a-half hours eating lunch, but honestly I can’t afford to do that.”

Despite the sacrifices, Sherry, like most athletes interviewed, said that playing her sport is worth it.

“Obviously it takes up a lot of time,” Sherry said. “But I love hockey, so I’m willing to make that sacrifice.”

This is the first in a four-part series on the lives of student-athletes at Princeton. Tomorrow, a look at admission and recruiting.

About This Series: Work on this series began last spring with a number of interviews with University administrators, coaches and athletes. Interviews continued this fall. In total, dozens of interviews were conducted to obtain the perspectives of a wide array of student-athletes, coaches, professors and administrators. At one point this fall, the athletics department restricted its personnel, including coaches and athletes, from speaking to The Daily Princetonian for this project. Subsequently, the athletics department asked the three writers to submit a list of sources and contacted these sources individually before they were permitted to speak with the writers. The writers then met with Director of Athletics Gary Walters ’67 and his senior staff. The four articles of this series present the findings of this research.