Final Project - Rodriguez, Bibiannna

The speaker, Bibiana Rodriguez, discusses the challenges of being an NCAA athlete in her podcast. She talks about the difficulties of managing schedules, choosing classes, and balancing athletic and academic priorities. Underperformance in sports can also affect a person's overall well-being. The speaker mentions the physical demands of traveling, practicing, and doing homework on the road. She also highlights the sacrifices athletes make, such as missing out on campus events. Despite the repetitive nature of an athlete's life, the speaker believes it is worth it for the opportunity to have school paid for and play Division I athletics. Hi, my name is Bibiana Rodriguez and welcome back to my podcast. What I'm going to be talking about on my final podcast is just the hardships that come with being an NCAA athlete. So I'm super passionate about this topic because I've been an NCAA athlete for two years now. Last year I attended Michigan State and played softball and decided to hit the transfer portal and now I go to DePaul. So I think being in two different institutions, I think it's really important to talk about just all the things that come with being an NCAA athlete. So the first thing I really wanted to talk about was how you have to fit your schedule into your practice, lift, game schedules. So like my class schedule right now is all online and last year during season I also had a lot of online classes, so like this class I heard was good to take as an athlete because you do everything online and do it in your own time, which is really important. I know a lot of athletes do pick classes based on that. I also picked an easier major, well maybe not easier, but I picked a different major just based on my priorities. I was a kinesiology and health science focus coming into college and now I am in sports business because I feel like it's much easier just as an athlete and pursuing what I want to do. I think priorities in general are just super big as an athlete because sometimes you have to weigh your athletic or academic side. One day you might have to wake up and do your homework at 6 in the morning or you're traveling in the airport and you have to do your homework and just things like that where some days you have to prioritize your athletic side, like I have a game today so I can't do my homework, I can't do study table due today, so just prioritizing what's more important. I also want to talk about underperformance. Underperformance in my sport especially is just really big. I think that a lot of the time it bleeds into the person you are outside of sports and that's really hard. Not a lot of people see the athletic side of you or all the time that goes into practice and games and lift and everything like that and a lot of the time they don't see how that affects you just as a person overall. I think that's really big and that's something that's not talked about as much as it should be is that it is really hard to try and balance everything at once. So right now we're in a travel schedule, we're in season, so a lot of the weekends we are traveling which means traveling on Thursday and then usually practicing on Thursday in another state and then playing on Friday, Saturday, Sunday usually and in preseason we play like two games per day and then on Sunday we usually play one but now we're in conference Big East so we play one game per day but I still think it's really physically demanding just as a student athlete because it is really hard to travel, practice, do everything on the road. You have to do your homework on the road, you're not home to be in class if you have in-person class and just all those things. I also want to talk about just a lot of the different activities that other students get to do that athletes don't get to do. I know there's a lot of things like on-campus events like this last weekend we just missed all the St. Patrick's events in Chicago so I think that's really hard is to see your at-school friends just be able to do whatever they want and you kind of have to know that your priorities are in your sport or at softball and yeah I think a typical day like an athlete life is just waking up for me at least now like I don't really have in-person class but just waking up, going to study table, then I'll usually have practice or treatment and then I'll have practice and then after that I'll probably study table, eat, sleep, go to bed and re-do the same thing over and over and over again so I think it is a really repetitive kind of life but I think overall it is worth it to be able to get your school paid for and to have the opportunity to play Division I athletics like not a lot of people can say that but I think that I just want to talk about kind of the life of an NCAA athlete because I have done two different institutions and had two different experiences so I just want to talk about that and just overall what it means to be an athlete but yeah that's all I have.