Last Sunday, the NCAA Twitter account posted a video with the caption “Student and athlete — a day in the life.” The tweet immediately sparked jokes, as the 30-second clip grossly underrepresented the typical workload for a student-athlete.
In the video, the student is seen going about his day. We see him wake up, attend class, wandering campus, on a run, wandering campus while dancing, playing basketball and on his phone in the library before putting his head back on the pillow.
The tweet has garnered over 1,000 replies, consisting mostly of gifs expressing disbelief and jokes about the missed mark the video attempted to make. Many users shared their stories of waking up at 6 a.m. for conditioning and staying up until all hours of the night to finish homework after long days of classes and practice. Some even posted images of their daily schedules, totaling the sheer amount of time devoted to academics and athletes the video failed to show.
On the surface, the video missed multiple things student-athletes do every single day. The person shown didn’t eat or drink anything at any point, a sheer impossibility to perform well without sufficiently fueling the body. There was also no weight training shown, which occur usually at the early hours of the morning before going to any classes. No meetings, no getting treatment or rehabbing at the trainer. Not even a shower? That’s just nasty.
While I understand the video is only 30 seconds and couldn’t possibly reflect the entire day in the life of every student-athlete, it made playing a sport in college look more like an additional hobby than an intensive, required part of our schedule. One user on Twitter said, “This is equivalent to a regular college student who plays intramural basketball.”
Being able to balance multiple classes along with practices and everything else mentioned above, along with even more like study hall hours, tutoring sessions, jobs and extracurriculars, can be daunting. Trying to squeeze in a full eight hours of sleep while staying on top of assignments and grades is hard. Being alert and present in classes after physically and mentally draining workouts is difficult.
None of this is shown in the NCAA video. Instead, the ad makes being a student-athlete look fun and easy. While there are plenty of fun parts throughout the day, that doesn’t make it any easier.
It’s hard to show the life of being a student-athlete, especially since all 24 NCAA-sponsored sports will have different schedules.
However, the video the NCAA posted to Twitter could have shown so much more. What could have been a great promotion for what being an athlete in college is like, the video failed to display what really happens day-to-day, becoming a joke for the audience for which it was intended.
