AM/PM
With the advent of many athletes’ sports season, a significant amount of athletes are now forced to miss class time in order to participate in games. Are student-athletes who attend classes in the AM cohort advantaged over ones in PM as they miss class less often? Annika Gnesda, a Pleasant Valley Varsity Soccer player in the AM cohort, believes that the “AM schedule lets [her] have the later half of [her] day for school and sports”. Being in the AM cohort also saves Gnesda from some stress she reports. If Gnesda were in the PM schedule, she believes that she would have to “miss more classes on game day and would not have a break between school and practice” which would stop her “brain from overworking” and also use less time to make up work .
Liam Eller, a football player for PV in the AM cohort, also believes being in AM gives him advantages that other athletes in PM would not have. Eller believes that an advantage of being in AM are not only the breaks given to AM athletes in between practice and school and the larger amount of preparation time for school as previously mentioned but the time that is given to “mentally
transition from school to sports as well”. Eller later added, “the time given to start focusing on sports can definitely affect [his] play during practice because [he] has time to adjust from school and start focusing on doing my best in practice”.
In contrast, however, missed time may not affect some students as previously perceived. Matthew Kuperman, a tennis player for Pleasant Valley in the PM cohort, believes that missing in-class time had a very negligible impact on his grades. “It really doesn’t affect my grades”, Kuperman stated. “Really, the only bad part of being an athlete in PM is the missed instructional time, which doesn’t really affect me because I normally take naps during instructional time, and the fact that I have to go back to class to pick up papers I missed that day”.
Kuperman has been forced to leave class to play in tennis matches four times in the past two weeks and is expected to miss two more per week for the remainder of the tennis season. Eller and Gnesda have both reported that they have not been forced to miss any class time for sports. At this moment, it is unclear if student-athletes in the AM schedule have an advantage in academics compared to those in PM without further investigation.
Ethan is a senior and this is his second year on the Saga. He likes to play video games like Valorant in his free time.
