Many people at Concord Academy feel that there is not enough time between sports seasons. As a member of girl’s soccer, my season ended on Wednesday, November 9, while cross-country and boys varsity soccer seasons extended through Saturday, November 12. This leaves many athletes with only two school days – Monday and Tuesday – free of a sports practice before their winter teams kickoff. Not to mention, one of those two days off is the closing ceremony. I want more time off, and it is hard to imagine that I am alone in this feeling.
I feel that I need a break with more time to relax. A couple of days (one day for some teams!) is not enough. Moreover, the too-short break is only a portion of a larger problem at CA: sports practice takes so much time that school becomes extremely stressful. Sports are supposed to be fun releases. Instead, we want a break from them. The reason why is that it sometimes seems impossible to do much else at Concord Academy while on a sports team. It simply takes a lot of time.
I want to share my experience with CA sports. I generally like sports and love soccer. I play soccer for fun on many weekends and summers. Yet, despite my deep passion for the game, I have long felt that the amount of time in practice is overwhelming. This is especially true for teams that practice at Moriarty, which adds an extra half-hour on the bus.
This year, the girl's soccer team got back to campus at around 6:20 p.m. every day, which meant that I, as a day student (like most of my teammates), got home around seven. One thing I should mention is that the system was unfair to the girls varsity soccer teams as they are on the late bus to Moriarty every day all year (the next year it switches to a different team). Furthermore, soccer practice was – and is – fun, but it was not the thing I wanted to be doing with all my downtime. It meant that most after-school activities had to be done on the weekends, or not at all. If I did not want to stay up late, this meant that I frequently had less than an hour of downtime a night. Whole parts of my life were put on hold until the soccer season ended.
Last year, I was thinking about trying out for basketball, but held back, knowing the time commitment it would require. This is the perfect example of how this policy hurts CA athletics: it discourages casual or new players from trying out new sports because the time commitment is so high. These players may not be the stars of the program but they are still valuable. They would allow us to have a junior varsity team in more sports, which improves the experience because everyone gets to play at their level.