STEELE SPORTS

As any athlete knows, the off-season can be your best friend or worst enemy.

Part of being a student-athlete is dealing with the year-round pressure to not only handle business in the classroom, but also progress at your craft while nobody is watching.

However, once school ends for the academic year, the real battle begins in the summer.

With no early mornings or homework to keep you occupied, sunny summer days can be the ultimate test of one’s dedication to their sport.

I know for a fact that the summer between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college was the most pivotal time in my athletic career.

Quite honestly, it is also the summer when most young athletes tend to have the most freedom as they are now young adults.

Most of my days were spent going to the beach or running around with friends, while I failed to consistently find time to put in the work I knew I needed to arrive at fall football camp in the best possible shape.

If you’re an athlete reading this, or a parent with a child headed into college athletics, remember this: Every moment counts.

When I arrived at fall camp at the University of St. Thomas, I realized right away that college athletics are unforgiving.

For an entire month, we lived with roommates in the freshman dorms, with football meetings, practices, weight-lifting sessions, and team meals from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Football became our life.

To this day, my biggest regret in my athletic career is failing to prepare in the summer.

What coaches will not tell you is that there is a finite window of time during the beginning of the season when they are assessing athletes’ potential to contribute to the team.

In camp, that window was as early as the first day, with roster depth charts already being made the moment the first whistle sounded for practice.

On a roster of 153 athletes my freshman year, there was no way for coaches to be there for every athlete all the time.

The process is very much “sink or swim,” and the most crucial aspect to positively affect your reputation and potential in the eyes of coaches is to do all the right things when nobody is watching you.

Accountability is the most valued trait in the eyes of coaches.

So speaking on the topic of accountability, I will leave you with a story from an athlete who wishes he would have understood this concept sooner.

On the first week of camp, we had our conditioning test to see where everyone stacked up after the summer.

All we had to do as position groups was complete multiple sets of ladder sprints in under seven minutes.

After finishing the first leg of sprints, I knew that I was in trouble for the rest of the way.

I managed to pass, but I did so by the skin of my teeth, impressing nobody in the process.

When I got back to the locker room I sat in my stall and stared blankly into the ground trying to feel normal again.

That’s when it hit me… the conditioning test was seven minutes of my life.

Seven minutes of physical and mental pain that felt like hours.

In the grand scheme of things, that seven minutes is meaningless – it’s passed and marks such an insignificant amount of time in my 24 years of life.

What I learned from those seven minutes is that pain is temporary, but regret lasts forever.