Student Athletes need more time off over break

Aloera Ostermann, Staff Writer

Every year the normal student body gets a week off for Thanksgiving and 14 days off for Christmas break. But a typical student athlete only gets Thanksgiving day off and four to five days off for Christmas.  

While there are many benefits to having practice over break, student athletes should get a few more days off of practices depending on the time of the season and the situation. Sometimes near the beginning of the season it may be necessary to have practices over break but athletes should still have more than one day off. Some practice is necessary because the team may be learning new plays and will have better retention of them if they don’t have multiple days off in a row.

But after the first stretch of the season, athletes need the time off. Being mentally engaged in school and sports for that long is hard for any teenager to do. Straining for weeks on end in the classroom takes a toll on anyone which is one of the reasons we have breaks in the first place. It works no different for sports. Student athletes need the time off to heal not only their minds but their bodies. For anyone to perform at the highest level they need their bodies to be well rested and taken care off. Having days off during a break from school gives those students the time that they need.

Aside from needing a break to heal, many student athletes and their families are restricted by practices. Going on vacation is simply not an option when you play a sport, especially a winter sport. Many winter sports start before Thanksgiving and have practices over nearly the whole break. On top of that they get only four or five days off over the entire Christmas break. With only the minimal amount of days off it simply does not allow for traveling out of the state.

Student athletes in winter sports have to face the fact that they simply will not be attending a family Thanksgiving dinner at a relative’s house and if they do get the opportunity to go they most likely will not be able to stay and visit or hang out with the family they haven’t seen in such a long time. If more days without practice were set during the Thanksgiving break many families would be able to spend more time with their children and relatives.

For those who choose to skip practice for a vacation the consequences will be equally as bad. In most sports, in basketball for sure, every day that an athlete misses practice they have to make up with different conditioning, for basketball there is a set amount of running. Nobody wants to be “punished” for choosing to spend much needed time with their families.

The same goes for over Christmas break. There are more days off but not enough to spend a good amount of time with family. If a family was to go on vacation they would have to account for the travel time which would cut in to the amount of time actually spent with their family and adding practice on top of all of that would just make things more difficult.

While any athlete should know going into a winter sport that their free time is going to be restricted over Thanksgiving and Christmas break, that is not the only season that is affected. Fall sports are also affected by the practices that happen during the summer before school starts. Nearly every season is affected in one way or another by this problem and there should be a few more days off for student athletes because they need time off from school and sports. Athletes have to keep their grades high in order to play a sport, which is sometimes difficult since they are often using a lot of their study time to practice. Athletes are required to keep their grades high even if their time to work on school is being nearly cut in half compared to some other students. Student athletes often find themselves doing all the work of the normal student body and then some which is all the more reason that they need their breaks to have more time off.

Being an athlete requires a lot of work and is very time consuming. Because of this the student athletes need more time off of practices during their breaks. Athletes do still need to practice but they should be given multiple days off so they can perform better on the days that they are required to attend practice. Everyone needs a break to recuperate at some point even student athletes.