Balancing academic and athletic time management : A qualitative exploration of first year student athletes’ university football experiences

Participation in a varsity athletic program requires a great amount of time and effort to meet the demands of practices, meetings, training, film sessions and games, thus adding extra stressors to first-year students trying to integrate into university life in general. These time commitments may reduce a student athlete’s academic engagement and, therefore, negatively affect one’s academic success. The purpose of this study is to identify the challenges of time management identified by first-year varsity athletes. The phenomenological qualitative approach was used to analyze the data collected from in-depth interviews conducted with 12 first-year football players at a Canadian university. The results indicated that : (1) time spent participating in football-related activities influenced the amount of time which could be spent engaging in academics; (2) the management of one’s time emerged as the most difficult aspect of being a member in the university’s football program; (3) football commitments occupied so much time during the season making it difficult to find time for other activities such as studying, working on assignments, eating properly, or getting enough sleep; and, (4). the university’s looser academic structure and the free time between courses (compared secondary schools) poses a considerable time management challenge, one that may be mitigated by the highly-structured football program.