Varsity athletes routinely face a set of challenges that most of their classmates never will. Beyond the in-season constant of balancing academic and team obligations, players frequently take coursework with them on road trips and sit through classes aching after pushing their bodies to the limit in games and practices. And unlike at many large Division I programs, athletes at Princeton do not have the option of taking easy-A classes.
The University’s academic program poses unique hurdles for athletes at each phase of their Princeton careers. During freshman fall, while most students can focus on adjusting to the rigors of a college courseload, in-season varsity athletes must simultaneously adapt to athletic competition more intense than what they had previously faced. By senior year, those in spring sports must finish their theses in between games and practices: No weeklong stretches exist for marathon sessions in a lab or carrel.
Yet athletes also have their own set of academic resources. Freshman athletes have academic role models in older teammates, benefiting from relationships that are less formal than those that freshmen have with their residential college advisers and less clouded by social pressures than those that some freshmen have with older members of their fraternities or sororities. There is also at least one faculty academic adviser affiliated with each team.
The key to any student-athlete’s success is no secret: time management, they consistently said in interviews. With major time constraints, athletes have to buckle down and efficiently use available time to complete schoolwork.
But working at that pace is not easy. “The time you’re spending playing your sport does make you tired,” said Sasha Sherry ’11, a defender on the women’s hockey team. “The last thing you want to do is grab your backpack and go to the library.”
While many Division I programs hold mandatory study halls for athletes, only freshmen on the football team have required time for academic work at Princeton. Many athletes said they appreciate the athletics department’s hands-off approach.
“We don’t get special treatment here,” Fiorito said. “We’re student-athletes in every sense.”
Unlike many of their lacrosse competitors from other schools, “We don’t have a study hall, we don’t have tutors, and we’re not given [academic support] on the basis that we’re athletes,” Fiorito explained.
Greg Hughes ’96, who is head coach of the heavyweight crew and rowed as a student, emphasized that “when you’re on our team, you are a student-athlete.”
“Student comes first, and I think that is what makes athletics work,” he noted.
“I think our kids are happier competing because they don’t feel like they have to fit into one role,” Hughes added. “They get to be a Princeton kid, but they also get to be an athlete.”
The ultimate intellectual challenge for all Princetonians is, of course, the senior thesis. While fall sport competitors can put off most of their work until after the season ends without much difficulty, winter and spring athletes must balance their team obligations as they work to meet the April deadlines.
Many spring athletes start working in earnest on their theses months before many of their classmates so they can finish much of their work before the season begins.
“I have to do a lot of work now in the fall,” said Erin Tochihara ’11, the starting goalkeeper on the women’s lacrosse team. “I have to submit proposals and get the majority of the work done before season.”
Seniors in spring sports face academic and athletic consequences if they do not finish their theses early. Noel Gonzales-Luna ’10, who was a second baseman on the baseball team, said in an interview in April that his senior thesis work detracted from his team’s spring break trip, one of his favorite parts of the season.
“My dreams were always playing pro ball, where you get up and all you do is play baseball — that’s the only thing you have to worry about,” explained Gonzales-Luna, an operations research and financial engineering major who walked on to the team as a freshman. “Spring trip is where you get to live that up.”
But for his final trip, Gonzales-Luna had a very different experience. “Having a thesis is [like], you play, and then you go back to work, which takes away from that. In general, it was stressful,” he said. He added that as a senior, the thesis “is just kind of always hanging over you, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Along with facing their own academic hurdles, seniors help underclassmen adapt to Ivy League classes, offering advice that many said was invaluable to their transition to college life.
“The upperclassmen take the younger ones under their wings, and show them the way, because they remember how tough it was for them,” said Cheryl Stevens ’10, who was a center on the women’s basketball team. “You try to pass the things you learned yourself along because you don’t want them to have to struggle and learn on their own.”
Upperclassmen commonly advise that athletes enroll in some classes that are less time-consuming while in season and suggest some courses that fit the bill.
“On top of core classes, it helps to take classes that aren’t so demanding,” Gonzales-Luna said. “We definitely suggest classes, and it’s helpful when there are a few guys in the same class. We definitely try to help them out and adjust to the academics.”
In addition to advice passed down by upperclassmen, athletes benefit from the guidance of faculty fellows assigned to each team. This advising program was initiated in 1999 by Director of Athletics Gary Walters ’67, a former point guard who played on the same basketball team as Bill Bradley ’65 — a man still upheld as the ultimate student-athlete success for averaging nearly 30 points per game and winning a Rhodes Scholarship.
The program, which Walters said is “almost unique in the country,” features nearly 100 professors and administrators who partner with varsity teams. Advisers organize formal and informal meetings throughout the year with all members of their team, checking in on academic and extracurricular progress, particularly for underclassmen.
“The faculty fellow acts as a resource and a friend,” said Gene Grossman, an economics professor and faculty fellow for the men’s basketball and football teams. “We try to get to know freshmen by having a dinner early in the school year with them. We let them know that we’re a faculty member who won’t be giving them grades.”
Grossman does, however, eventually play a more direct role for some of his advisees. “For those majoring in economics, I act as an academic and senior thesis adviser and provide help in finding summer internships.”
Bill Tierney, the former head coach of the men’s lacrosse team who left in 2009 to take over the lacrosse program at the University of Denver, said he is working to develop a similar fellowship program at his new school after seeing its success at Princeton.
Fellows often attend their teams’ home matches and are also encouraged to take at least one road trip with the team each season.
“If you spend a weekend on the road and see how hard they compete, you gain a profound appreciation for how hard they have to work,” said Peter Quimby, the deputy dean of the college and a fellow for the field hockey and men’s hockey teams.
As a group, athletic recruits enter the University with lower academic marks than the overall student body. Yet Quimby, who is also the University’s faculty athletics representative to the NCAA, said that student athletes’ hard work leads to both athletic and academic success.
“There is no reason to believe that student-athletes are represented disproportionately in academic problems,” Quimby added.
Assistant Dean of the College Diane McKay seconded Quimby’s sentiments. “I do meet with student-athletes on academic probation, to ensure that they have a plan in place for improving their academic performance and balancing their commitments,” she said in an e-mail. But, she continued, “this is a very small part of my job because there are few student-athletes in this situation each year.”
Quimby said that a major reason for athletes’ academic success is their time-management ability, an idea echoed by athletes themselves.
Like many of the athletes interviewed, Fiorito said he performs even better academically while in season specifically because “there’s no time to really waste.”
“I personally work better when time is crunched and I have to sit down,” Fiorito said. “If I want to go to bed by midnight, it's eating and working; there’s not really any time to relax.”
This is the third in a four-part series on the lives of student-athletes. Tomorrow, a look at why athletes choose Princeton.
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