By NEEL MADHAVEN
The Daily Athenaeum
On his busiest days, West Virginia redshirt senior offensive lineman Grant Lingafelter wakes up at the crack of dawn to get ready for morning workouts and lifting sessions at Milan Puskar Stadium.
On this particular day, Lingafelter’s day begins at 6:30 a.m. and won’t end until around midnight.
It’s no secret that student-athletes lead busy, hectic and stressful lives.
With between 12 and 20 credit hours of classes per week, daily team meetings, meals, lifting sessions, workouts, position meetings, film sessions, treatment, homework, studying, practice and study hall to balance out during the week, it’s a wonder how student-athletes have enough energy to go full speed when game day comes along.
“On a typical day, I’ll get up around 9 a.m., head to class until about 12:30 p.m., drive to the stadium to get ready for practice and meetings, go out for practice until around 7 p.m., then eat dinner and do homework until around 11 p.m. and get ready to do it again the next day,” Lingafelter said.
WVU’s student-athlete development staff helps football players and other student-athletes plan their class schedules and manage their academic plans in accordance with their athletics schedules.
Mark Hanselman, an academic advisor for student-athletes at WVU, encourages student-athletes to take their more challenging courses in the offseason, so that they have more time available to dedicate to those classes.
“Since some athletes travel so much during a semester of competition, some classes are off limits during the season,” Hanselman said. “For instance, baseball players cannot take ENGL (English) 101 or 102 in the spring semesters because travel with the team forces them to miss more classes than the English department allows for those courses. The same is true for football, except they can’t take those classes in the fall.”
For redshirt senior safety Shane Commodore, balancing academics with the time demands of athletics came naturally.
“You just have to be really disciplined, and I think a lot of student athletes are good with because there are days where you focus on classes and academics and on other days you have to focus on football,” Commodore said. “You go to class in the morning and focus on football in the afternoon.”
Both Lingafelter and Commodore have been named to Academic All-Big 12 Conference teams – Lingafelter in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and Commodore in 2016. That accomplishment shows how both have been able to manage their time to be successful on the football field and in the classroom.
“It was a big honor for me to receive because I have always prided myself on getting good grades,” Lingafelter said.
Both are redshirt seniors, with Lingafelter being a general business student while Commodore is studying accounting.
“I had a teacher in high school that I had a ton of respect for and that I really liked, really made it seem like something I could do as a career in the future,” Commodore said. “[Accounting] wasn’t the major I started off in, I actually started off in MIS [management information systems]. I ended up switching because it wasn’t as good, and it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.”
According to NFL.com, just 1.6 percent of college football players make it to the professional level. With this statistic, even if a player has professional aspirations, it’s always a smart move to have a degree and a career possibility to fall back on.
“Football will not last forever, but an education and degree will,” Lingafelter said. “Getting good grades has always been my number one priority.”
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