PITTSBORO — The question was simple: Can you describe a day in the life of a student-athlete? The answer, as roughly 40 Northwood high schoolers learned last Thursday, was a lot more complex.
Purdue’s Tessa Sheets walked them through her Monday-Wednesday-Friday routine of freshman year, from 6 a.m. lifts and 7:30 a.m. chemistry labs to afternoon stretches, practices and ice baths.
Appalachian State’s Brendan Harrington rattled off all the obligations of a normal Tuesday: workouts, rushed breakfasts, two hours of team and position group meetings and tiny 10-minute pockets of down time.
And when the former Northwood athletes had finished their requested spiels, Jason Amy, the school’s co-athletic director and a friend of Sheets and Harrington both, could only shake his head and laugh.
“See?” he said. “It’s very demanding. You’re eating, sleeping and breathing what you love — and you better love it, because there’s no hiding from it.”
That sequence was just a snippet of Northwood’s College Recruiting Simplified event, an hour-long webinar the school held over Zoom last week for interested student-athletes, parents and coaches.
Recruiting literacy has always been an emphasis at Northwood, a 3A school which sends off 10 to 15 student-athletes to college programs annually. But this event was of extra importance, Amy said, since the coronavirus pandemic has drastically altered how recruiters and recruitees now function.
So he brought in the big guns — Sheets, a senior pole vaulter for Purdue’s track and field team, and Harrington, a sophomore outside linebacker for App State’s football team — to give current Chargers some words of wisdom. Later in the evening, the group also got an extensive presentation from Lindsay Milo, a representative for the nationwide recruiting service Next College Student Athlete.
Calling in from their respective campuses in West Lafayette, Indiana, and Boone, Sheets, 21, and Harrington, 19, detailed their Division 1 recruiting processes, daily schedules, biggest college adjustments and more.
It wasn’t as intense as “Beyond Scared Straight” reality check, but the former Chargers made one thing clear: to reap the full benefits of college athletics, you have to put in the work. And lots of it.
“In college, it only gets harder,” Harrington said. “School bumps up. Off the field bumps up. You’re not with mom and dad anymore. You can’t say, ‘Coach, my alarm didn’t go off.’ It’s your life now. You can’t play around with it.”
Sheets, a 2017 Northwood alum, said the adjustment is a learning curve. She pointed to her sophomore year — “probably the worst year of my life” — as an example. During those two semesters, Sheets fell into two bad habits: eating poorly and not sleeping enough. As a result, she struggled in meets.
It took a summer of recuperation and a few meetings with team psychologists and nutritionists to turn things around for Sheets (who, for the record, feels great now). What did the experience teach her?
“This sounds so cliché,” she said, laughing, “but so many problems can be solved with getting good sleep and eating right … that’s the best advice I can give.”
Harrington, a December 2018 Northwood alum who enrolled early at App State, said it’s always important for student-athletes to take downtime. But you have to “hold your love for the game,” too, he said, and find ways to separate yourself from the countless players vying for the same spots you are.
“Putting in the extra work, it really starts in high school,” Harrington said. “I was going to find ways to make myself better. You have to put time aside.” (Those practices have served him well at App State, where he’s flourishing as a first-time starter at linebacker.)
After about 30 minutes of Sheets and Harrington, Amy turned it over to Milo. She’s a director of regional recruiting for NCSA, a website that works directly with over 40,000 college coaches across dozens of sports to fill their rosters with prospective student-athletes.
Among the topics Milo touched on in a PowerPoint: the coronavirus-altered recruiting timeline, the importance of unweighted GPAs and core course requirements, social media strategy and a breakdown of how Division I, Division II, Division III, NAIA schools and junior colleges provide athletic and/or academic scholarships.
“A lot of parents don’t know there’s money at the Division II level,” said Milo, who played basketball and volleyball at Clemson. “You have to keep your options open.”
As the webinar wrapped up, Milo took questions and gave instructions on creating an effective NCSA account, which every Northwood student-athlete got for free as a perk for their attendance.
And Amy took the time to again praise his two featured guests. Their perspectives, he said, were an invaluable learning experience for Northwood’s current high school athletes — who, if they remain committed, may blossom into the next Sheets or Harrington themselves.
Reporter Chapel Fowler can be reached at cfowler@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @chapelfowler.