Time in the Lives of Division III Student Athletes

Abstract

The ways that Division III student athletes prioritize and manage time emerged as the dominant theme in a series of focus group interviews conducted at a small, private liberal arts university. Several rounds of coding and memoing identified three major elements of this dominant theme, which are explored in greater depth in this paper. First, athletics provides student athletes the anchor for structuring the use of time. Second, student athletes creatively coordinate their athletic, academic, and personal timetables to deal with the competing demands on their time through the strategies of multitasking and cutting time. Finally, student athletes assert that participation in athletics has the positive outcome of making them better time managers in season than out of season.