1. Being a freshman for the second time in your life is equally as bad as the first time.
You left high school thinking that you ran that place. Suddenly you're back to hauling ball bags and gathering people's sweaty laundry all while being told you're doing it wrong in the first place.
2. There is no offseason.
You used to be able to enjoy a secondary sport or maybe you used to jog in your free time. From now on you will be training every day leading up to the season. And on those days when you're not training, all you're going to be thinking about is the training you should be doing to stay in shape.
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3. You may think you learned a lot from playing in high school, but you are not nearly as smart as you think you are.
You were the leading scorer in high school? You got team MVP? Well, think again freshman because that dodge is going to get you flattened like a pancake on the college field.
4. Workout clothes are your new uniform.
If you actually find the time to do your hair and put on real pants more power to you. That is if your pants even fit you after three months of lifting has kicked in.
5. If you thought your skills were good in high school, you'll tend to rethink that when you have an All-American running at you.
You may feel incredibly confident coming into college. But once you see a 22-year-old woman with easily 50 pounds on you running down the field you tend to reevaluate your internal self-praise.
6. Your body will never not hurt.
On the second week of conditioning someone said to me, "Savor it. Your body will never feel as good again as it does right now." They were right. From now on every time you walk up the stairs you will wonder if you're dying or just sore.
7. Whoever said athletes can eat whatever they want is the same person who said the freshman 15 doesn't exist.
Yeah, your body doesn't really care if you just ran fourteen 200's and you'd like to reward yourself. But with that being said, there are days when you definitely need those three cookies to keep morale up for another day of Microeconomics class.
8. Napping is an art form. Seriously.
You will come to learn that laying down on the locker room floor and closing your eyes for five minutes is now considered a nap. Only the truly gifted can space them out properly to make up for only getting five hours of sleep.
9. The slow moving students walking through the quad complaining about how hard their day has been will never cease to annoy you.
Yeah, I'm really sorry that you got plastered last night and your chapter meeting ran late, but I just spent the last hour running sprints so maybe just shut your mouth and walk a little faster.
10. People will automatically assume you're unintelligent because you play a sport.
Half the time you show up to class drenched in sweat and looking like you just ran a marathon, but on top of that people are going to assume you have an IQ lower than 50 just because you're a member of the NCAA.
11. You do not know the limits of waking up early until you have been subjected to 6 a.m. lifts.
Managing to drag yourself out of bed three days a week at a time that is basically still considered night is not for the faint of heart. And deciding to schedule a class for directly after is something I can only call stupid.
12. Ice baths should be considered a form of unlawful torture.
I do not care how sore your body is. Nothing will ever make it okay to submerge yourself in near-hypothermic level temperatures.
13. You tend to cherish your snack times more than any other time of day.
When breakfast is at 6am and lunch time doesn't really exist because you have practice, you learn to space out very small snacks to eat throughout the day, and have no shame of eating in class.
14. Nothing drowns out the pain of a conditioning day like a pint of ice cream.
I don't care what I said about gaining the freshman 15. Your mental sanity comes before anything else and after coach makes you run hills or do extra sprints, nothing feels better than 1200 calories of chocolate and caramel swirls.
15. You gain a family.
I wouldn't trade this experience for anything in the world. All of the sprints, the early mornings, and the long days of practice are all just small sacrifices that we make to be a part of something so special. I was lucky to have such incredible Seniors to lead my team this year, and I can't wait to do it all over again.
