Life as a student athlete

Think about how busy your typical day is.

Now, imagine fitting in three or more hours of athletic activities into each day. That’s the life of a Ferris student athlete.

“Being an athlete, you learn a lot more time management I think than you would not playing a sport,” Ferris pre-dental hygiene sophomore Lexee Summers said. “You kind of get a feel for how it’s going to be after you leave college and have to juggle a lot of things.”

Summers, who is from Coloma, is the second b a s ewoma n for Ferris’ softball team. The softball team practices for three hours every weekday and has a few games a week. She said she gets up around 7:00 a.m. or 7:30 a.m. every day and often doesn’t go to sleep until around 2 a.m.

“Coffee is definitely a big thing in my life,” Summers said. “I find time to sleep, but I need to study, too. I feel like I have to really work to keep [my grades] as good as I can. If I wasn’t a student athlete, I would have a lot more time.”

Ferris mechanical engineering technology sophomore Chase Benson, who is from Delaware, Ohio, runs track and cross country at Ferris. He said that on top of having less free time than a traditional college student, another big difference of being a student athlete is how he made his best friends.

“The one thing that surprised me about being a student athlete is how close my friends on the team and I are,” Benson said. “Most of my best friends are on the team with me compared to the ones in my classes or residence hall.”

Though she’s given up a lot to play college softball, Summers said she wouldn’t change it.

“I give up a lot of my weekends and we don’t ever get a spring break because we go down to Florida,” Summers said. “We always go to Ohio for Ferris Fest so we don’t get to do that, and we’ve never gone home for Easter because we always have a tournament. It’s tough, but I love playing softball so if I have to give something up I’m not going to be crushed.”

Summers said she’ll miss her teammates and athlete status the most when she’s no longer a Bulldog.

“It’s kind of a like a lifestyle,” she said. “Just the sense of being an athlete… You have the title and you represent the school in a different kind of way. I’ll miss the girls the most, though. I can probably play slow pitch after here but probably not with the same girls.”