Time Management For Athletes
Time management is a learnable skill and coaches can be integral in their athletes’ time IQ.
On Tuesday, we took a look at time management for coaches. Now, all student-athletes, but especially collegiate athletes, handle so much each year. New living spaces, away from home, new classes, practice and training schedules, new friends, and myriad responsibilities to juggle. How do we help our athletes manage their time and all the craziness they’ll encounter each year?
Most athletes thrive when they are in tune with their “why.” Have a meeting with each of your athletes to better understand their goals, vision, and “why” they chose to play their sport while being a student. Then, either advise or guide your athletes through prioritizing the categories of their responsibilities and have them block time for those categories in their planners.
Additionally, supplying our athletes with plans and schedules to the best of our abilities can help with avoiding any confusion or miscommunication. Covid rules, regulations, and protocols have made things pretty weird and schedules much more last-minute and difficult to execute. So, doing our best to plan as far out as possible and communicating with our athletes when schedules may take longer than usual to come out can help our athletes feel more prepared and secure. Similarly, it’s often not helpful for anyone to have exhausted and stressed athletes at practice because they just ran to practice immediately after training or they just took an exam and ran to training all flustered and disconnected. By allotting supple time between their responsibilities, you can help reduce their stress and will allow them to focus better at practice, training, in the classroom, and during team interactions (Nielsen et al., 2018).
Be sure to check in with your athletes from time to time. Extraneous circumstances like mid-terms, family issues, sickness, or general stress can affect how proactive our athletes can be with their schedules. By checking in with them intermittently, you and your athletes can help avoid any undue stress and shuffle priorities if needed (Haney, 2004). Also, it is important that we assist our athletes with their time management by encouraging them to take time for themselves, for fun activities, for self-care, and especially for sleep. If there isn’t any fun or relaxation time, we could be on a crash course to burnout and that can ultimately affect their performance and happiness (Halson, 2019).
How do you help your athletes manage their time and responsibilities? Comment below!
References
Halson, S. L. (2019). Sleep monitoring in athletes: motivation, methods, miscalculations and why it matters. Sports Medicine, 49(10), 1487-1497.
Haney, C. J. (2004). Stress-Management interventions for female athletes: Relaxation and cognitive restructuring. International Journal of Sport Psychology.
Nielsen, R. O., Bertelsen, M. L., Møller, M., Hulme, A., Windt, J., Verhagen, E., ... & Parner, E. T. (2018). Training load and structure-specific load: applications for sport injury causality and data analyses. British journal of sports medicine, 52(16), 1016-1017.