That College Thing

Hey guys,

As that time of my life comes around, the junior year of high school, I've been, *ahem* "forced" to start looking into colleges that I plan on applying to. Hopefully I'll be able to major in a sports-related field, like physical therapy, kinesiology, or sports sciences. Now, college is a great thing, as you all know, and is most of the time, the key to success later in life. So, no problems with college, right? Well, apart from the selection process(i.e. stress, additional work, recommendations, and overall leaving your home), there is only one problem that relates to us junior triathletes, and that, is scholarships.

There are many conflicting issues with college triathletes, the biggest of which is that triathlon is not an NCAA sport, and so there are no scholarships at all for it. This is a problem for a couple of reasons; first of which being the obvious, and that is triathletes cannot go to college for the sport of triathlon. More often than not, however, a triathlete may receive a scholarship for an individual sport of the three, swimming, cycling, or running, because of a specialty, which almost every triathlete has. While this seems like not so bad of a option, it can ruin a triathlete's training. For example, I know a former college swimmer who was a triathlete at the time she was swimming for her school. In our conversation, she told me that, due to the high-intensity, fierce competition of college single-sport athletes, she was forced under her scholarship agreement to train almost exclusively in the water, and left her almost no free time to train for running and cycling. That is one way a triathlete is put out of commission, and this may be why our sport has not gathered as much popularity as football, basketball, soccer, etc., because one would have no incentive to start in a sport that has no college offers!

Although, club teams are very well established at some colleges. In my immediate area, I have met athletes from the UNCW Triathlon Club, the NCSU Triathlon Club, ECU Triathlon club, and Duke Triathlon Club. All of these colleges have very interested collegiate athletes, and are the base for triathlon exposure in the college life! Tell me, how many of you have heard of collegiate nationals? Because that is a thing, where college triathlon clubs meet to race against each other and for a national championship. It has many races, including a draft legal race and Olympic distance race as well. But a big obstacle to this event, is funding. Many colleges have issues with finding the appropriate funds to be able to travel to the qualifying events and then to the actual championship, which is yet another hurdle that the athletes have to overcome. You all know triathlon is expensive enough, without all the travel!

So the big picture here is that in order for triathlon to get as big as other sports, like it deserves(because, let's be real here guys, triathlon is awesome), then the NCAA needs to make triathlon a collegiate sport! Bottom line, at the end of the day, that's what needs to happen.

Happy training guys!