Passion and Perseverance: The Key to Success for Student-Athletes

Success. One word that has many different meanings to many different people. To some, it means making a great amount of money, while others define it as finding happiness and love. However, student-athletes define success a bit differently. To a student-athlete, success means winning games, breaking records, and making history, all while maintaining good grades in the classroom. For many students, college is challenging. With exams, projects, and papers due throughout the year, it can be overwhelming at times. For student-athletes, on top of all that is required academically, an intense amount of their time is also spent practicing their sport and competing. So, with all that student-athletes have on their plate, what enables them to succeed, in both classroom and competition. It all comes down to grit. In the TED Talk, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” Angela Lee Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, stated, “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals” (Duckworth). Student-athletes often face setbacks and adversities. Their passion for their sport gives them the power to push through. Their perseverance gets them past the challenges and difficulties that may come as a student-athlete. With grit, student-athletes succeed because the passion they possess for their sport allows them to use their perseverance when overcoming failures and drawbacks while being a student, and challenges and hard work while being an athlete.

For most student-athletes, the passion and love they have for the sport they perform are what drives them to also perform their best academically. To continue to compete, student-athletes are required to maintain a certain GPA. If athletes are not able to carry out the responsibility of keeping up with class assignments and earning good grades, the activity they love to do most gets taken away. There are many resources provided to student-athletes that are not always available to the average student. If a student-athlete is struggling in a class, tutoring is available, and extra office hours are offered. However, it is up to the student whether these resources are used or not. When a student-athlete is falling behind academically, their passion for their sport keeps them determined to catch up and their perseverance gets them through the struggle. Without passion for the sport they play, the drive to perform well in the classroom would not be as strong. The saying about a student-athlete is that they are a student first. Being a student is extremely important to being a student-athlete. If you cannot be a student, you cannot be an athlete.

The type of passion a student-athlete has for their sport is also a factor in their academic success. In a study done by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at California State University, Fresno, it was found that there are two types of passion: obsessive and harmonious. Obsessive passion for an activity may lead to dependency on that activity. Harmonious passion develops with the importance of an activity being fully accepted without any contingencies (Yukhymenko-Lescroart 3). The study also “showed that in a sample of student-athletes harmonious passion for sport positively predicted academic persistence” (Yukhymenko-Lescroart 3). Student-athletes who have a harmonious passion for their sport are not focusing solely on athletic performance. They also place a great deal of importance on their academic achievement. The importance of the sport that a student-athlete competes in is significant, but it does not overpower the importance of their academics. Being able to balance the importance of sport and academia increases success for the student and the athlete. While having a passion for their sport is important, knowing that their education is important as well is crucial to success.

Grit is not only critical to a student-athlete’s success academically. It is also crucial to their athletic achievement. There are many obstacles that a student-athlete will overcome when practicing for and competing in their sport. There will be losses, mistakes, setbacks, and defeats that feel worse than death. Student-athletes who have high levels of grit are capable of overcoming challenges and adversities that they may experience. In the article, “Examining the Effects of Mindfulness–Acceptance–Commitment Training on Self-Compassion and Grit among Elite Female Athletes,” the results of a study to examine how increased grit improves performance was shared, in which the author, Mahmoud Mohebi, stated, “Athletes with high grit [...] overcome obstacles, perform optimally in high-pressure environments, pursue the level of excellence and enjoy long and successful careers” (Mohebi et al. 3). Student-athletes who have high grit can persevere through failures and learn from mistakes. Difficulty can arise when a new skill or technique must be mastered. Confidence may decrease when proficiency does not occur the first few times. However, the passion a student-athlete has and the perseverance they possess get them past the difficulty and to success. Sometimes losing a game or a race is the worst feeling in the world. Student-athletes with lower levels of grit may take that loss and believe they can never achieve that win and will not be able to improve. In high grit student-athletes, losing is just another step to the top. They can look back at why they were not able to succeed in that competition and then work hard at improving. They will persevere through their failures and overcome the adversities they face. By continuously looking for ways to improve and then putting in passionate and dedicated work, student-athletes are capable of success.

Sometimes major setbacks can make or break a student-athlete. Whether it is a brain injury, a torn ACL, or a broken bone, injuries that take a student-athlete out for the remainder of a season can have a major impact on mental health and may lead to giving up and quitting. In one study done about how grit affected the resilience of college football players, authors, Gupta and Sudhesh stated, “Athletes often undergo injuries [...], hence the way they respond to it, or how resilient they are gains supreme importance” (Gupta and Sudhesh 844). The approach that a student-athlete has when they experience an injury is significantly important to their recovery. When a student-athlete does not have high grit, an injury can be seen as career-ending, and they may give up. Student-athletes with high levels of grit have the passion for their sport to enable them to persevere through an injury. Major injuries can take months to recover from. Student-athletes may have to do physical therapy, and even after that, it will take time to relearn certain movements and return to full fitness. Suffering an injury also teaches student-athletes new skills that will help them succeed after recovering. They may learn how to prevent the same injury from repeating itself. While injured, student-athletes can improve in other areas of their life, both academically and athletically. The grit a student-athlete has throughout an injury will not only help them successfully recover, but it will also help them succeed in competition and the classroom.

Grit also gets student-athletes through years of extremely long hours of hard work. Most student-athletes begin playing their sport at an early age and continue all through college, with a handful even making it to the professional ranks. That means that student-athletes have practiced and perfected their craft for many years. They have struggled and suffered through challenges and losses and have worked exceedingly hard to learn and overcome. While many people believe that with enough practice you can achieve anything, if that practice is not done with passion and dedication, success will not come. In the article, “10,000 Hours May Not Make a Master After All,” Maia Szalavitz states, “It’s clear that not just any practice, but only dedicated and intensive honing of skills that counts” (Szalavitz). Only with an athlete's passion, desire, and determination, can the practice they put in lead to success. When someone loses their passion for something, the dedication put into it decreases. When an athlete is not putting in one-hundred ten percent of their passion and effort while practicing, especially if their goal is to make it professionally, there is almost no point in practicing. All the top professional athletes that are seen on television and social media around the world have their own stories, but one thing is true in all of them: their grit. They all spent years practicing the sport they perform, but unlike many people that had dreams as kids of wanting to play professional baseball or soccer, they had the grit that enabled them to succeed. When a student-athlete uses the passion they have for their sport while practicing, and they persevere through challenges and hardships, success can be reached.

Overall, a student-athlete’s desire to compete, their passion for the sport they love, their knowledge of the importance of both sport and academia, and their willingness to persevere through adversity, lead to high achievement and success. Student-athletes who have grit succeed because their love of the sport motivates them to persevere through hardships and setbacks in school as well as the demands of competing as an athlete. The elevated level of grit that student-athletes have is developed over many years. Your level of grit can be increased and improve your chances of success. Even if you were never a student-athlete or you do not plan to become one, having grit can help you become successful in whichever way you define it.