who here has played collegiate athletics? (fun topic)

[punit328]

Who here has played sports on the collegiate level- Division 1, 2 or 3? Where did you play and what was your experience like?

 

[Yakuza Rich]

played golf at Coastal Carolina University.

It was....a disappointment.

Well, playing on the team was.

Mainly because the coach was an arse and a creep. 10 guys on a team and it got split up into cliques with the southern guys vs. the yankees & canadians (I'm from NY) vs. the guys from England.

Part of the problem was the coach that recruited was gone within a year of me getting there. The new coach came along and he was an assistant from U. of Florida, a prestigious program, and just assumed everything there would be the same at CCU, which has far less funding.

Plus, the coach was in love with golfers from England, even if the sucked. We had one guy who had a tough time cracking the starting lineup, used to party all of the time and not show up for practice (I actually got along very well with him). Then the guy decides to quit the team and play on the soccer team because he was a good soccer player and could transfer his scholarship there. Our coach would persistently call him and kiss his arse to get him back on the team.

Or my senior year when we had a chance to make the NCAA tournament, but before the year started one of our key guys decides to redshirt. Why? Because his best friend was on our team and was a junior and he wanted to play his senior year together. I then proceeded to call him something I can't say here and the coach...who didn't like me to begin with, really had me in his doghouse.

So much of it I disagreed with on principle. We had a PGM program and while I was treated great, the PGM guys who weren't on the team were treated like dogs. Tough to see friends go thru that when some guys on the team with the ambition to be golf bums gets treated like royalty. Long practices, having to show up for freaking study hall, road trips and playing in cold, crappy weather...7 hour rounds. Ugh.

The study hall thing really bothered me because I hate having to be told where to be and by my sophomore year I had a friend who was of average intelligence, but did extremely well in school and seemed to never study....teach me how to effectively study in a short period of time. So unless I had some type of homework assignment, I had no need to study. Also, we were often assigned a lot of group projects in my classes, but I couldn't just work with the group and count that as study hall.

Overall I loved going to school there. I think things would've been better if it weren't for the coach. I'd probably recommend that anybody that has a decent shot of going to school on scholarship, to try and find *former* players and get their opinions of the coach. Some coaches are really cool, a lot are awful, miserable hiuman beings. If you ask former players, you usually get an honest opinion.





YR

 

[ajk23az]

I can kind of but not really say that I played D2 basketball.

I'm from North Dakota and I had a scholarship for golf and basketball to the University of Mary in Bismarck, ND. They switched from NAIA to D2 the year I was going to attend. I practiced with them a bit before the season and then decided afterwards to pursue other endeavors at a different school. So in essence, I COULD have played but decided not to haha.

It was fun while I was there. The coach was an idiot, as evidenced by him leaving a few years later and then the team turns into the best in the conference.

 

[peplaw06]

I walked on to the tennis team at Abilene Christian.

I worked out with the team for probably six weeks, but because I wasn't on scholarship, I wasn't going to get to play much. There weren't enough hours in the day to do that, go to class, and have a job, so I had to make a decision as to what to do.

I enjoyed being with the team and liked the other players and the coach. The coach was straightforward with me, saying I probably wouldn't be playing until I was a junior or senior. I needed the job worse at the time.