Mr. Time Management

Scott Rolin, a football player at Virginia Tech University, thrives in a structured environment where your day is planned out and the routine becomes second nature.

"I would say the strict scheduling.  Every hour of the day you are doing something whether it is class, lifting and conditioning, or practice. Having morning workouts helped me a lot with my classes."

We hear it all summer from our parents before we enter our first semester of college.  "College is all about time management." "If you can manage your time, college will be a piece of cake." We would just roll our eyes and smile nicely.  Even though we heard it a million times we never took a second to internalize the importance of managing your time.

Student-athletes have the luxury of having a base structure of their agenda. Classes must be scheduled during a certain block of time and practice is the same time every day. Even though that might seem like it is a whole day it really isn't.

Class and practice at the most take up about six hours of your day, and assuming you sleep eight hours a night that still leaves you with ten hours. 

What do you do with those ten hours? Do you get an extra workout in? Spend a few of them studying? Or lounge around as much as possible until you have practice?

Learning to optimize your time allows you to optimize yourself.  There is nothing wrong with some down time, but there is a lot that can be done to benefit you as a student-athlete with ten hours. 

Mentally, scheduling every hour of your time makes the day go by quicker because you are accomplishing so much. Get to the training room an hour before practice and take care of your body so you can demonstrate the best version of yourself to your coach during practice. Make sure you give yourself at least an hour or two to get your assignments done before hand minimizing the chaos of doing it the night before. 

Micromanaging your time holds you more accountable to yourself and others by physically seeing on your computer or smartphone what needs to be done during that day.