You are probably walking around waddling like a duck due to the soreness in every part of your body caused by Spring Season. If you decide to play a college sport these two words will most likely become the most dreaded words in your vocabulary from March to May. It’s a shortened period of time when your coach can run practices during the off-season. Depending on your school and division level you may only have one set of scrimmages at the end of this season. Therefore there are no games separating practices as they do during your actual season. To most athletes, at most colleges, this means one thing: running.
Normally this is the case for many teams, where waking up at an early hour of the morning (scary for any college student), can be the norm to engage in a training routine. The training is geared to keep you in shape and to help you work out muscles that you never even knew existed!
Now that we have completely scared you off from playing a college sport because of this thing called spring season, you will come to appreciate this and see that your efforts in doing so are well worth it. Here is why.
First, you probably already played all year round for your high school travel teams, so this will seem no different during your first year. It only gets hard when you start to get used to such a long break between your regular season and spring season. However, this means that once you finish your regular season you probably haven’t had a chance to see a lot of your team. Being back with everyone for a few days a week is a lot of fun!
Second, this forces you to keep in great shape during the off-season. It can be easy to push aside a workout with so much on your plate during a busy semester. Plus, you have 20-something other people helping to push you through a hard workout! You can create a spirit of community sharing your individual experiences like posting on Twitter how sore one is the next day. This helps to keep the team chemistry going strong since we all relate to each other on a daily basis!
Lastly, it’s a time when you can work on the skills that you need or want to perfect for the next season. Coaches can focus more on basic skills, and hopefully fun drills, to help you keep in shape for your sport.
So, although you might be currently dreading those two words, you can feel content still playing the sport you love and being around teammates that make that sport so much more fun! Just remember, no one ever said college sports would be easy! They’re a give and take, but if you give everything you’ve got then the take will be much more rewarding!
