Student-athlete.
Take out the hyphen, and it’s just student. Athlete.
For the players on the Oregon men’s basketball team, this weekend marks
their fourth-straight road trip. That means missed classes, tests on the
road and study tables with their closest buddies on the team.
Add the excitement of the NCAA Tournament, the thrill of a Pacific-10
Conference title and the presence of media even in classes. It’s a recipe for academic disaster.
“People really don’t understand,” said Duck guard Ben Lindquist, who
last season received the team’s Harry Ritchie Scholar-Athlete award and a Pac-10 All-Academic Honorable Mention. “They see the basketball, they see us on the court, they think that athletes are treated in a certain way. But it’s tough. Guys struggle. I struggle at times.”
The student-athletes of the basketball team wrestle with academic
pressures that are almost back-breaking. They go on the road for half of the basketball season, and often practice daily at home. They miss class, and are expected to make up the missed work themselves. They deal with professors who can’t comprehend the life of a 21-year-old being pulled in 100 directions.
“Some of my teachers have been gracious but some of them could care less
about us,” Oregon forward Luke Jackson said. “It’s real hard to deal with that because we’re not regular students. We’re out on the road and it’s pretty difficult.”
The Ducks’ academic masseuse is, surprisingly, head coach Ernie Kent.
The coach could yank the players away from studies and onto the basketball court, but instead he often sends them back to the books.
“We’ve had Sunday off and Monday off, and coach said all right, time to
get focused, get your stuff done,” Lindquist said Tuesday. “That’s what
I’ve been doing. That way you can go out on the road and just enjoy it to its fullest.”
Kent said he tries to separate the student and the athlete as much as
possible, but with equal amounts of time devoted to both endeavors.
“Every year when we deal with basketball at finals time, when that is
over with there’s a sense of relief that will free them up,” Kent said.
“That’s what we wanted to do by coming back here and getting our finals done with as opposed to putting them off down the road and having that hang over your head.”
For many of the players, that meant rescheduling finals for earlier in
the week, thereby giving them less study time than other students. Or taking finals on the road with a proctor.
“It’s tough to take a test in a hotel room with someone standing over
your shoulder,” Lindquist said. “I took a test last week where I know I
would have done better if I had been here.”
Lindquist was done with finals on Tuesday. Jackson finished up his
finals after practice on Tuesday, before the team left for Wisconsin early Wednesday morning. Big man Chris Christoffersen said he was looking forward to at least two finals on the road.
“It’s all about communication with teachers,” Christoffersen said. “We
always have a few hours set aside on the road to study.”
Lindquist said that the schedule-shifting and special requests often
lead to bitterness between teachers and student-athletes. As a senior, he now knows the difference between a basketball-lover and a hoops-hater.
“Not to give out my sources, but I have had teachers in the past where
I’ll say hey, I like their style or they work well with the predicaments
that come up,” Lindquist said. “There are some teachers where I’ll say I’ve heard things about this teacher, I’ll probably stay away from them.”
But the senior guard said that the teachers aren’t always at fault for
the tension.
“Some student-athletes are just as much to blame for that as the
teachers,” Lindquist said. “There have been a lot of (not just basketball players, and not just one particular department) but some athletes who just won’t show up to class, or they’ll freeload, and that does have a negative influence on some students in the basketball program.”
Some athletes even had their academic lives caught on tape. Anthony
Lever and others had ESPN film crews follow them into finals, as the sports network has had an all-access Duck pass in the last few weeks.
The student-athletes agree that academic juggling is merely
something to “work through,” according to Jackson or part of “the
trade-off,” according to Lindquist.
And as the Ducks head off to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, they
can only dream of professors sitting in front of various televisions,
playing March Madness as they grade the academic madness that the Oregon
players go through.
E-mail sports reporter Peter Hockaday
at [email protected].