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The Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center formed the Student News Bureau as an opportunity for ten students to get real-world reporting experience at the 2011 NCAA Women's Basketball Final Four. Stories are posted at Sportsjournalism.org

Notre Dame, Texas A&M student-athletes balance basketball and academics

By Kate Guerra
IU Final Four News Bureau

The trip back to South Bend after Notre Dame’s amazing upset of No. 1-seed Tennessee was one of celebration and joy. Everyone was in awe of Skylar Diggins’ outstanding performance. She scored a season-high 24 points, putting her among past Irish greats who scored 1,000 points during their playing years. And she did it as a sophomore to boot. Everyone was celebrating – except maybe Diggins herself.

That night, Diggins’ head was elsewhere. It was somewhere in the land of economics and business theory. She was buried underneath a heap of textbooks and scribbled-on pieces of paper, hoping the knowledge would sink into her brain like her shot sunk into the net just hours before. She had an exam at 7:30 the next morning. The bus did not roll into South Bend until 2:15 a.m.

“It’s very tough, especially when you’re at a school that is as relentless on academics as Notre Dame is,” Diggins said. “We’re just trying to get done what we need to get done to play the game we love.”

It would be easy for the athletes of Notre Dame and Texas A&M to get caught up in the excitement of making it to a national championship game, especially as No. 2-seeds in a sport that historically is won by the same powerhouse teams every year. Instead, they have tried to keep the adrenaline under control and remember to focus on the first part of the “student athlete” label.

As a college athlete, making a name for yourself off the court is even more important than making one on it. According to the NCAA, only 1.3 percent of college athletes go on to play professional sports. In women’s basketball, that percentage drops to 0.9 percent.

“It just helps that you have the kind of people on your team who care about their grades and not just their athletics,” Texas A&M junior Sydney Carter said. “Not everybody’s future is in basketball, so you got to make sure that you have your education to fall back on.”

To help ease the stress of keeping all their priorities organized, athletes will typically have academic advisers that make sure they are keeping on top of their responsibilities. At Texas A&M, the adviser works as a middleman between students and professors when the team is traveling.

Aggie senior guard Maryann Baker is the envy of her teammates because she graduated in December. She is now taking graduate courses and finds the lighter schedule more flexible when juggling team demands. Though she has it easier now, she clearly remembers the stress of her undergraduate studies.

 “I could pick up if they were ‘pro-athlete’ or not,” Baker said of her professors. “So I knew if I needed to work harder or get things done ahead of time if they didn’t seem very willing to work with me.”

Notre Dame senior captain Becca Bruszewski described the moment before knowing whether or not a professor will work with an athlete as a feeling of sheer panic. But many athletes competing this week have found that uncooperative professors are generally not the norm.

The majority of the time, professors are willing to meet with the athletes and work out a schedule to turn in assignments early, push back a test date or get notes from a designated note-taker. Occasionally, professors will even express to athletes how proud they are of their accomplishments and wish them luck on upcoming competitions, with a hint of school spirit showing through

 “I had this one class where I hadn’t been in like a week because of travel,” Bruszewski said. “I went to go turn something in, and I had the whole class standing up and cheering. (The professor) congratulated me, and it’s so great to see the schools supporting us – and the professors.”

Notre Dame has an absence policy requiring students miss no more than three days in each of their classes, and athletes must abide by that policy. All team schedules must pass through the Faculty Board of Athletics, which is made up of faculty members who have the athletes’ best interests in mind.

It is difficult for athletes to keep to the three-day policy. They are excused if they go over that limit because of school-sponsored travel, but the board tries to keep them as close to it as possible. If the women’s basketball team has a Tuesday game 887 miles away at the University of Connecticut, players would not leave South Bend until after all classes finished on Monday. Then they would leave immediately after the game is over to get back for the next morning’s classes.

Student athletes have to find a way to balance their education with their sport. In order to be successful, they have to develop the mental stamina to fight through the drowsiness and get to that 8 a.m. class when they just arrived back in town three hours earlier from a grueling game the night before.

It requires a lot of personal motivation, but it helps that they are in the same boat as their teammates. Texas A&M players Danielle Adams and Tyra White are both Agricultural Leadership and Development majors and share the same math class.

It makes it nice to have someone to share the misery of an early morning study session, White said. And the studying must get done, even if they’re playing for the national championship.

The IU Final Four News Bureau includes student journalists working with the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University.