Brady Boie – Sports & Fitness Editor
Welcome to the sports section of the Gustavian Weekly! Here is where you will find all the best and most up-to-date sports articles related to the Gustavus Athletic program. You can expect three or four weekly commentaries on the most relevant sporting events and occurrences in the MIAC. These articles will include recaps of the biggest games, features of our brightest stars, and previews of highly anticipated matchups. If you are interested in working as a sports writer or have an article idea, reach out to me at bradyboie@gustavus.edu.
For our first article, I wanted to write a piece for our incoming first-years and offer advice to the athletes who will be donning the black and gold for the first time. As a student athlete myself, here are the three most helpful pieces of advice I can give to a first-years participating in a sports program at Gustavus.
- Come in with an open mindset – Be willing to learn new things, take advice from an older teammate, and listen to your coach. Even if you think you know more than the person giving you advice, hear them out. Oftentimes they will know something that you don’t. Don’t come in with a “my way or the highway” approach. People will find this off-putting and you will be minimizing your potential as both a teammate and an athlete. By allowing yourself, your technique, and your approach to be critiqued, you will be more likely to improve than your peers who come in with a closed mind. Yes, your ways and habits made you the athlete you are today, but your willingness to tweak those things will drive your continued success throughout your collegiate career.
- Your change in lifestyle will change your performance – College is a time of huge change in everyone’s lives, and the college athlete at Gustavus is no exception. For the first time in your life you will not have homecooked meals, you will not have someone monitoring your weekend adventures, and you will not have the same sleep schedule. All of these factors play into your athletic performance and have more of an impact than you may realize. Now I am not saying that you can’t enjoy the new freedoms of college- I am saying you need to be aware of it. There’s also a flip side to this. Many of you have not had serious weight training experience before coming to college. This change in lifestyle can positively impact your performance.
- Same fish, bigger pond – This concept is one of the easiest things for students to understand, but one of the hardest for athletes to come to terms with. Many collegiate athletes come into college programs with strong opinions of themselves and their abilities. They were the best athletes in their middle and high schools and often represented their schools well at the state and national level of competition. So why wouldn’t they be the best athlete at Gustavus? Well, because they aren’t the only person who has had that experience. Everyone was the high school hero that their teammates looked to, but not everyone can do the same thing at college in a sea of other former high school heroes. Your approach, your mindset, and your decisions will ultimately decide whether you can swim with the big fishes or will integrate yourself into the larger school.
I wish you all a good first week of school on the hill. Go Gusties!