By Joseph Krum
Managing Editor
@joseph_krum

Wake up. Practice. Go to school. Do homework. Go to bed.

Repeat.

The life of a high school athlete can get repetitive. No one enjoys waking up early four or more days a week for a multi-hour practice. Then, after practice each morning, going through a seven hour school day with multiple hours of homework can be extremely exhausting.

So why does society view athletes as jocks who just breeze through school and only care about their sports?

One of the main reasons athletes are portrayed in such a manner is because of the media. I have personally seen multiple times in television athletes portrayed as “dumb jocks”. For example, in the popular TV show “Friday Night Lights”, Tim Riggins is a football player that is shown to not care about school at all and has a fairly low intelligence. Although it is all in good laughs, it has placed a standard in people’s minds that all athletes are this way. I’ve even seen other students look down on athletes academically, even though most of them, in my opinion, are hard workers.

And it’s not even that people just think athletes have a lower intelligence. Many think teachers and coaches let failing grades slide just so athletes can play in their sports, since they would be academically ineligible according to UIL rules.

As a football player (football seemingly to be the sport under the most scrutiny) I have witnessed our head coach, Mike Dewitt, express multiple times the importance of grades. We would not be eligible to play in any games for at least three weeks if we had a failing grade in a class at the end of a grading period. He always says that it’s on us to raise our grades, and even is lenient when we have to miss practice time for tutoring for a certain class.

A football player who has certainly broken the stereotype of the “dumb jock” outlook and, like coach Dewitt has preached, taking his grades seriously is Seattle Seahawks’ star Richard Sherman. In high school, he earned himself a 4.1 Grade Point Average according to a story done by the Washington Post, and even supposedly pushed his teammates to do better and tutoring them. Even though he is seen as a trash talker and a “thug” to some, he is considered to be one of the smartest players that is playing the game. After high school, Sherman attended Stanford which is one of the top academic schools in the nations. Just like Sherman, Coppell’s own Solomon Thomas is attending Stanford on a football scholarship as well.

Even in Coppell, there are athletes who fit along with society’s view of them. Jarrad Cisco, a senior cornerback, is a National Merit Scholar Semifinalist. Cisco is one of only 36 semifinalists from Coppell and 16,000 nationally.

For football, we have a total of eight practices a week and three of them are early in the morning before school. I’m not saying this for you to pity me, but it is a daily struggle to work through school and multiple hours of homework and even stay up late to get it done, just to have to wake up early to practice the next day.
Also, the work that we put in mostly goes unnoticed. All summer, while most people are hanging out by the pool or with friends, we are either working out or practicing. I may be biased, but athletes have to be some of the hardest working individuals of the school in order to keep up.