Our athletes are also students

Shane Wade
Opinion Editor

Even as a student, it’s easy to forget that the athletes that represent our school, individuals that enjoy a celebrity-like status among us, are also students. As often as we see them on posters, in the local news or on national television, it’s too easy to forget they spend just as much of their time studying for exams, doing homework or asking questions in class.

Student athletes enjoy great privileges, but at the cost of shouldering enormous responsibilities. They’re to be model students, representing the university wherever they go and in their every public action. Unlike for some students, a failing grade has real-world consequences for them beyond their financial aid.

So when someone walks away from that status, though we gasp, they may breathe a sigh of relief.

DJ Haley’s decision to leave the basketball program, just like Pope Benedict’s decision to resign from the papacy, represents individual courage and an unseen progression. It’s easy to go with the status quo and avoid self-advocacy, but it takes courage to make great personal changes. That’s courage that we should all recognize.

Socializing, sports and recreation occupy too much time for some and not enough time for others. Moderation in activities can occur both simultaneously, through time management and gradually, through leaving when the time is right. Generally, students try to be multifaceted and manage activities through careful time management. Haley chose to demonstrate the latter, an equally meaningful decision.

Academics should be every student’s primary focus when they arrive here. That message cannot be reinforced enough.

Unfortunately, as much as the university would assert otherwise, the fact is that the intensity and virality of college athletics, including how much attention it garners and how popular donations to our athletic department are, sometimes sends a mixed message to the both the rest of the student community and the public.

That ire is evident within mutterings about additions that are specifically for student athletes or big bonuses for coaches being unfair to the larger, financially suffering student community, particularly when such news coincides with announcements regarding tuition raises.

Just last month, MeadWestvaco made a $3 million donation to our Department of Intercollegiate Athletics. A week after that announcement, university president Michael Rao confirmed that tuition will increase next year. While there’s no connection between the two announcements, the student body has the right to be frustrated.

Our 2011 foray into the Final Four garnered VCU international attention and publicity. According to Google Trends, March 2011 accounts for the most Google searches for the phrase “vcu” ever. Following the spring of 2011, our Open House events and daily campus tours grew exponentially.

VCU has benefited enormously from our more than 250 student athletes, to the tune of millions of dollars in advertisements, donations, facility expansions and most prominently, undergraduate student application and prospection.

Although the university has multiple resources and services available for our student athletes, they must also recognize that we’re entering a changing collegiate environment.

The reality is that there’s an intense peer and populist pressure on them to perform well. Choices to alleviate that pressure by leaving should be met with a contemplative reception by administrators and wide support by fans.

I wish Haley and all our student athletes are best of luck, in all their endeavors.