Being a first-year student at Whitman is an experience akin to watching a bad Michael Bay movie. You don’t really know what’s going on and you’re not sure if you even should, but things are exploding left and right in great heaping balls of fire. The special effects are perplexing but engaging and your adrenaline is pumping for a reason you can’t even quite identify.
Add the time commitment, various responsibilities and frenetic lifestyle of a college athlete to the unmistakable bedlam of the normal Whitman first-year experience, and finding an appropriate movie analogy becomes much harder. Anything short of a cinematic experience that actually singes your eyebrows and lights you on fire for every explosion in the movie wouldn’t quite do justice to the equation. In other words, being a first-year student-athlete at Whitman can get pretty crazy.
Hyperbole aside, more than one in five Whitman students plays a varsity sport. This means that there are currently more than 80 first-year students in the class of 2013 who are roughly five weeks into discovering the challenge of being a student-athlete here at Whitman: having an experience that is unequivocally distinct from the rest of their classmates.
Not surprisingly, the greatest challenge for these first-year athletes is finding the balance between the rigorous academic workload of Whitman: “rigorous,” of course, meaning “extremely rigorous”: and the commitment of being a college athlete, especially with regards to time. The old concept of time management has found new life in the daily lives of these student-athletes.
“You just have to manage your time really well. In between every class if I ever have down time I’m working on homework or like planning out my week and on the bus, everyone is always doing homework: you have to if you want to get everything done,” said Jaclyn Rudd, a first-year varsity soccer player who contributes at midfield for the Whitman team.
Of course, as much time as first-years spend reading books for Encounters and writing analytical essays into the late hours of the night, the first-year experience is largely characterized by the social life: hanging in section, meeting people in the residence halls, flirting with cute girls or handsome guys. Basically, it’s a time for first-years to acquaint themselves with the other people with whom they’ll be spending the next four years.
For first-year student-athletes, however, between practices, games, road trips, workouts and meetings, there isn’t nearly as much time to socialize with the class.
“It’s like a mixed bag because I’ve missed out on a couple big events due to tennis, but besides that it’s good,” said first-year tennis player Matt Tesmond. “[Being on a team] gives you an instant group of friends, basically, and then you can just grow from there.”
Despite the obstacles of being a first-year athlete, playing a familiar sport with people from different classes provides a major assist in handling the transition from high school to college.
“Actually, a lot of people have to do it, but I have no idea how I would acquaint myself [with Whitman] without tennis. That would be a lot harder, I think,” said Tesmond.
Rudd expressed a similar appreciation for the soccer team.
“I have this great resource that first-years might not: I can know everything that’s going on, what to expect out of everything. It’s kind of an amazing experience because you get to be part of another thing, rather than just being part of your new section: you have another group that you’re included in,” she said.
It’s evident that, despite the challenges of being a first-year student-athlete, these students wouldn’t have it any other way. Their first-year experience ultimately becomes defined by the hyphen in between “student” and “athlete.” One without the other would feel incomplete, not just because they play on a sports team here at Whitman, but because both are such vital parts of who they are and how they got here.
