The day doesn’t start with the bell for many Tualatin High School students; it starts at 6 a.m. For students who participate in sports, the hustle of the morning is real, and it’s a race against the clock for most, often starting with a quick protein bar, shoving everything they need for the day in their bag, running out the door to morning practice, quickly checking things off on their mental to-do list and adding last-minute assignments or tasks to the day.

After the school hours are up, the focus switches over to sports. Whether it’s hitting the turf for soccer, the court for basketball or the weight room, the next two and a half hours are a blur of physical exhaustion. By the time most students get home, it’s 6:30 or 7:00, and they’re starving, but then they remember the three hours of homework they have waiting for them. And the cycle repeats itself, happening every day for the next five, with one off day.

With this day-to-day pattern of school, practice, food, homework, sleep, repeat, many students get burned out and overwhelmed with schoolwork. For many, this survivor mode isn’t sustainable.

Varsity cheerleader and IB Diploma candidate Raphaela Tzantarmas said, “For my first two years, I think it was pretty easy to manage school and dance, but my junior year, I definitely started experiencing burnout more after I decided to join the full IB program, making the workload a little harder to manage.”

That’s why, to continue to show up feeling rested and ready to work in school and practice, student athletes have to prioritize themselves. Think of it as part of training. If you take care of yourself, you can push yourself harder academically and physically

The number one thing student athletes can start with is your sleep. Sleep is the number one most important thing for high school students.

Dan Lepping, an Athletic Trainer at the Sport Medicine Center at Children’s Hospital of Colorado, said on their website, “Sleep also triggers a cascade of events that allows our body to recover and become stronger from the stresses that were imposed on it through exercise as well as our daily activities. Any person who wants to be an elite performer needs to focus on getting elite sleep.”

All in all, if you are a student athlete and you’re struggling to keep up with the schoolwork and sports motivation, ask yourself if you are getting enough sleep. If the answer is no, you know what you can work on.