As soon as the semester ends, there has to be a panicked moment for all winter and spring sports coaches. They have to hope that all of their athletes have maintained the appropriate grades to continue with their respective seasons. They have to hope the mandatory study halls and other things to help student athletes maintain their grades have worked.
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Despite the help available to both student athletes and regular students, there are often athletes who find themselves below the 2.5 GPA required to remain on the team. Athletes who aren’t able to keep the necessary GPA for the semester will usually find themselves unceremoniously kicked off the team and left to fend for themselves.
It happens to every team eventually; someone gets cut from the team because of his or her grades. They come back from break expecting to have their unified team and find out that there is someone missing. Not only does it leave their coaches scrambling to try and reorganize their team, but it leaves their teammates disappointed and resentful of their former teammate. It can leave them with an empty spot to fill and team dynamics to fix.
Certain teams have always been more successful at maintaining their athletes’ grades and perhaps it’s time to start looking more closely at the methods these teams use. Keene State needs to start holding its athletes to a higher standard. Instead of allowing athletes to teeter close to the edge of failure, coaches should be taking a more proactive approach to helping athletes deal with their academic responsibilities.
Mediocrity, barely scraping by, or becoming academically ineligible should not be acceptable to any coach and they should work to make sure athletes are not falling behind academically. We should be demanding more from our student athletes; they are supposed to be model students after all.
