Athletes must navigate academic hurdles as they take difficult classes

Graphic by Amy Miao

Athletes taking challenging classes often have to make tough decisions to balance their packed schedules.

On the average Red Day Chemistry Honors teacher Kathy Nakamatsu watches as the clock strikes 3 p.m. in the middle of her seventh period class, signaling a handful of her students to pack up their things and head to their respective sports games. As they exit the door, Nakamatsu readies herself for another busy tutorial the next day filled with clarification questions on missed work.

“It’s challenging because Chemistry Honors is very fast-paced, so we cover a lot of material and conduct many labs,” Nakamatsu said. “When you miss a lab, you’re missing hands-on experience, which is extremely important.”

Late in the school day, student athletes regularly leave early for games and tournaments. For many, this comes at the cost of constantly missing assignments, lectures, in-class activities and even tests, since it is difficult for teachers to adjust their entire course calendars just for a few students in one period.

The other challenge is the huge chunks of time taken out of each day that athletes would usually use to get tasks like homework and projects done. Participating in high-level sports often means dedicating at least a few hours of every day and up to 20 hours of every week to the team, often in the hours right before or after school. That means that while a normal student might start their homework only an hour or so after school ends, many athletes won’t have the time until much later on in the evening.

The school uses the California Interscholastic Federation’s (CIF) 2.0 GPA requirement to determine eligibility for sports, but high academic pressure and a plethora of AP and Honors classes in many athletes’ schedules mean that other complications arise past partially missing classes. 

For athletic director Rick Ellis, learning to balance competing priorities is part of what it means to be a student athlete.

“Regardless of what classes a student is taking, they have a responsibility to the team to pull their weight, which means to be at all the practices and all the games,” Ellis said. 

One problem occurs when students join sports they don’t have a true interest in as a way of buffering the college applications or PE graduation requirements. Teachers like Ellis have noticed that these students often struggle the most with reconciling their academic and athletic lives.

“The kids who love playing, who want to be out there — they find a way to get [their work] done,” Ellis said. “The ones that are on the fence and are doing [sports] for different reasons have a tendency to struggle more in balancing.”

On the academic side, Nakamatsu has seen athletes’ grades suffer when they don’t actively communicate with her when they miss class for games.

“The kids who don’t check in with me and those who might not be the most organized students, the impact for them is more noticeable,” Nakamatsu said.

For student athletes who may find themselves struggling, coaches and teachers have employed a range of strategies to help get them back on track. 

For example, if a student’s 6-week grades come out and they have a GPA under 2.0, they can fill out an academic waiver form to explain their situation and create a strategy to raise their grades going forward, an option given to them once every two years. Coaches and teachers sometimes also check in with each other on a regular basis (around once a month) to discuss their students’ performances, allowing them to create personalized solutions like lowering commitment to practices to stay on top of homework.

Nevertheless, being on a sports team and taking multiple advanced classes at once is a decision made by students and their families, so managing the consequences of that decision is in their hands, not the coach’s.

For some student athletes, dealing with that responsibility and academic pressure requires creative and effective solutions. Junior Sarah Lim, the No. 2 girls’ golf player, decided to reduce her commitment to the team earlier this year due to a heavy academic workload. However, Lim, who also plays individually and spends most of her weekends practicing, realized she still needed to do more to balance taking challenging classes like AP Chemistry with her dedication to the sport.

In general, Lim finds that being aware of priorities and keeping up in terms of time management gives her the biggest boost when it comes to staying on top of assignments. In cases when she needs to miss classes, communicating beforehand and having a strategy to make up work ensures that she won’t have to scramble to catch up.

“For classes that are really lecture heavy, I have people that I will always ask to get notes that I missed,” Lim said. “And then, during tutorial, I can ask questions about the topics that I still don’t understand.”

While this works with smaller disruptions like weekly practices or nearby games, sometimes the scheduling of tournaments or playoffs requires missing up to an entire week of classes.

In those cases, Lim said, “It’s definitely really difficult to catch up when you’re missing school [for longer periods of time]. But just being able to communicate with your teachers and manage the things you need to do properly makes it a lot easier,” 

Although athletes like Lim are able to find ways to mitigate the effects of their busy schedules, Nakamatsu and other teachers find that more needs to be done on all sides to guarantee that the right decisions are being made, whether that means giving athletes a free seventh period or giving coaches full access to students’ grades.

Researchers have found, however, that sports do not necessarily come at the expense of academics: In fact, a metastudy by the University of Sydney confirms that sports participation boosts academic performance in students of all ages. But teachers and athletes agree that the combination of sports participation and tough class is a difficult balancing act.

“Playing sports isn’t for everybody — it’s a challenge in of itself. If it was easy, everyone would do it,” Ellis said. “But our student-athletes are studying hard and they’re playing hard, and in the end, they’re better for it.”