The Night It All Caught Up With Me
I remember it vividly. Friday night lights, the kind of game every college athlete dreams about. It was my junior year, in the final game before the playoffs, and I'd put huge pressure on myself to perform well enough to earn a playoff start. It was late November, grades were taking shape, my course load had piled up, and I was struggling. I was stressed about landing a summer internship. And I had just lost my grandma.
I put on a front, from the outside, everything looked fine. We'd just won a big game, but I couldn’t celebrate. When one of my best friends put an arm around me afterwards, I completely broke down. He spent half an hour with me in a dark corner on what should have been a great night.
My coaches didn't understand what was happening. I wasn't connecting with the people I needed to, and I hadn't told anyone what was going on. It all built to a rough end to the semester: we lost in the playoffs, I struggled through my classes, and finals were a grind.
It isn't easy to share, but college isn't all highlight reels, and there's value in being honest about the hard parts.
You're Not The Only One
Feeling overwhelmed wasn't unique to me. In the NCAA's 2022–23 well-being study, 44% of athletes in women's sports and 17% in men's sports said they felt constantly overwhelmed.
Prefer to watch? The full video is here: How an emotional breakdown showed me the importance of balance as a D1 college athlete
Three Full-Time Jobs, One Week
Being a student-athlete means running three jobs at once: your academics, your sport, and your life outside both. That night showed me I couldn't ignore any one of them. You don't need to give 100% to everything every day. You need a system that puts the right thing first at the right time.
Nobody Starts Out With It All Figured Out
I played D1 sport and graduated summa cum laude at the top of my class, but I started out with no balance, no schedule, no focus, and no results. I was not a perfect student-athlete (and I don’t think such a thing exists, a constant pendulum of balance). College hands you sudden freedom, no parent, no strict schedule, no one checking on where you are and making sure you are where you are supposed to be. Its all on you. So, you try to do everything, but the fun things feel less special when you haven't done what you needed to do first. You know you should have done the work so the fun stuff doesn’t feel so fun. Eventually I learned to schedule so my free time was as meaningful as my busy time. Instead of doom-scrolling, I'd pick something I genuinely wanted to do, like a Halloween fright night or a trip to the movies.
After interviewing hundreds of D1 student-athletes, I've found that the gap between those who graduate with great grades and those who drop out is rarely talent. It's the systems they use.
Why Scheduling Matters
Your perception of how you spend your time can be very different to reality. A schedule shows you where your time goes, and where it doesn't. Ideally within the first couple of weeks, you should know what your weekly routine looks like.
Make it something you can actually stick to. Set the bar too high from the start and you'll get frustrated and drop the plan altogether. Start with a realistic baseline, then progress it.
Focus Cycling
Your priorities should shift as the semester moves:
Early semester (Preseason, classes start): lean into your personal life and your sport. Reconnect with people, meet new ones, and settle into training. Don't ignore academics; show up to class and do the small assignments. They seem insignificant now but compound later.
Late semester (Playoffs, Finals): academics take a bigger share. But that doesn't mean living only in the library and the arena. Cut out your social life entirely and your mental health suffers. You may also leave college realizing you skipped opportunities you'll never get back.
Week to Week: Some weeks will be busier than others. The focuses will change, the deadlines, classes, and games dictate that. You have to be aware of the time your spending and whats coming up.
Your mindset and environment must reflect the hour to hour focus cycling as well as the week to week. Make sure your time, location, effort, resources, and appearance reflect it.
School: Make a Plan Before it's Urgent
The academic side is about acting early. Falling behind in a class, catching up on work, or getting a disappointing grade are all fixable once you admit they're happening.
Reach out early. If you've fallen behind, talk to your professor and build a structured plan to get back on track.
Respond to a bad grade with a plan. One bad assignment won't ruin your GPA. Letting bad grades pile up will.
Let deadlines set your hours. Base your study time on your workload and deadlines, not on how much time you'd like to spend. Midterms and finals are taxing, so give academics more time in those windows.
Start with non-negotiables. Put classes and fixed commitments in first, then build the rest of your schedule around them.
Chunk big assignments and exams. Break them into three to six pieces depending on your confidence, the weighting, and your current grade in the class. Fit each piece around your energy and time.
Communicate weekly. Let professors know ahead of time if you'll miss something, so they can adjust as easily as you can.
Professors are willing to help. They're just not willing to help people who clearly don't want it. Make the effort to go and get it.
Sport: Recovery Is Essential to Performance
Part of why I was so overwhelmed was that I wasn't taking care of myself. I was arguably overtraining, adding extra sessions at the exact point in the season when I should have been tapering. I felt so much pressure to perform that I overdid it outside games, and my performance in games dropped.
I'm a big fan of a simple checklist approach to recovery: The 100 Point Recovery System tick off the small things each day that add up to performing well. These compound into better performance; ignoring them and doing more doesn't.
The biggest takeaways:
Treat sleep as seriously as practice, arguably more so.
Plan meals around training. Prioritize carbs before and after sessions, and maximize your protein intake.
Know the difference between a hard session and being drained. Most coaches and strength and conditioning staff build easy and hard days into the week. If every day feels hard, tell your coaches. You can't peak in competition if you never recover between sessions.
Rest more late in the season, not less. It isn't an optional resource to save for later.
One Bad Game Isn't Definitive
Don't let one bad session or performance decide how the rest of your semester goes. It can be devastating, but you're more than one performance, and even the best have awful days. Often it's just a sign you're under-recovered or that something in your training needs to change. It’s feedback not a sign you’re done.
Personal Life: Don't Leave It To Chance
In that moment of feeling overwhelmed, I realized I hadn't spoken to my family all week. We were going through a tough period, and I'd avoided confronting it. If I had just talked to them, the week would have been far simpler.
Set check-in points with family through the week, whether that's a parent, a sibling or another relative. Not hours, but regularly.
Widen your support system. Think about the people you spend the most time with: coaches, athletic trainers, academic advisors. They want to help. You don't have to do it alone.
You're at college to develop as a person, not just as an athlete or a student. The goal is to leave with a better understanding of who you are and what you want to do, don’t come in believing you have it figured out-give yourself freedom to grow.
Schedule Your Free Time
Free time doesn’t just appear. You must schedule it before the week starts. That way you see how much you actually have, and you can make it meaningful instead of wasting it.
It isn't about taking a whole day off. It's an hour with friends, half an hour connecting with someone, or a evening for a date night. These keep you grounded, and for many people they give back energy and reduce burnout over a long semester and season.
The Weekly Reset
Block out 10 to 20 minutes each week to review the last seven days:
How much time did you spend on school, sport and personal life?
Use that to plan next week, starting with non-negotiables: classes, practice and study hall. Use your deadlines, games and work loads to establish a routine.
Reinforce your sleep and nutrition routines. If tracking them keeps you consistent, keep tracking.
Accountability drives adherence, and adherence is what gets you closer to the results you want.
What I'd tell myself that Friday night
Looking back at my schedule from that season, the problem wasn't how much I trained or studied. I loved my sport, so I spent every hour I could on it. What I needed was more time for a personal life, and more R&R. Following my own principle of focus cycling would have given me that.
- Extra gym before every lift, seven days a week
- Film through lunch, no time to eat
- Studying until late every night
- Recovery block after every practice
- Study in daytime gaps, done by evening
- Time for friends, family and a night off
Focus cycling means knowing what you're focusing on, then shaping your environment to match: your location, resources, time and mindset.
Focus Cycling
Your priorities should shift as the semester moves:
Early semester (Preseason, classes start): lean into your personal life and your sport. Reconnect with people, meet new ones, and settle into training. Don't ignore academics; show up to class and do the small assignments. They seem insignificant now but compound later.
Late semester (Playoffs, Finals): academics take a bigger share. But that doesn't mean living only in the library and the arena. Cut out your social life entirely and your mental health suffers. You may also leave college realizing you skipped opportunities you'll never get back.
Week to Week: Some weeks will be busier than others. The focuses will change, the deadlines, classes, and games dictate that. You have to be aware of the time your spending and whats coming up.
If I could go back to that night, here's what I'd say: it's okay to not be okay. It's just not okay to stay there without reaching out, or without taking ownership of what you're doing.
You won't be the perfect student, the perfect athlete or the perfect person every day. You just have to show up intentionally for what matters to you. There's a reason you're at college and a reason you play your sport. Connect your actions back to those reasons.
Balance isn't about perfection. It's about purpose.
AcaAthlete Advantage helps student-athletes build the systems to perform academically, athletically and personally. For more tailored coaching, get in touch, and watch the full video for a look at my schedule then versus what it should have been.
