ACADEMIC SUPPORT PAYS OFF

BY MARGO CARELSE

THERE HAS BEEN A PLEASING SURGE in sports graduates in recent years, including postgraduate students who are also athletes. In 2022, the University of the Western Cape (UWC) celebrated the graduation of 54 women’s soccer, rugby and cricket athletes and a total of 131 graduates across all sports.

“UWC DEFINITELY SEES THE IMPORTANCE of sports and how exercise leads to a healthier lifestyle. Ideally, we would want all our students to lead healthy lifestyles and our sports teams serve as an excellent motivator for this. Across South Africa, the popularity of university sports has seen continual growth and the university’s emphasis has paralleled this,” says Andrew Greenwood, Academic Manager of Sports Skills for Life Skills (SS4LS) at UWC.

SPORT REQUIRES DISCIPLINE and shapes athletes' characters, teaching them how to focus and work towards their goals without being sidetracked. Many athletes find managing their sports expectations and goals and the academic programme challenging.

“FROM AN ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVE, my main challenge is getting students to focus on anything beyond sports. Generally, students arrive with a sense of identity and value intertwined with being an athlete.

“THIS IS ENTIRELY UNDERSTANDABLE. In most instances, sport forms the source of most of their opportunities and recognition. Most schools bend over backwards to accommodate their athletes, move tests, assignments, and so forth. And, despite them being recruited into university for their sports, no such academic concessions are made, and it can sometimes cause dissonance.”

GREENWOOD SAYS for most athletes, the light bulb moment could be as simple as a good mark for a test or an assignment.

“That’s when they start to realise that they can succeed on both the field and in the lecture halls,” he says.

54 WOMEN’S SOCCER, RUGBY AND CRICKET ATHLETES GRADUATED IN 2022

131 GRADUATES ACROSS ALL SPORTS IN 2022

THE SS4LS ACADEMIC PROGRAMME supports athletes recruited to study at UWC by offering career assessments to help them choose degrees, reviewing their academic results and developing action plans based on their results.“We work with a lot of first-generation students where there isn’t someone in their family who has studied previously. We provide a lot of help and support, especially in the early phases of making decisions, selecting modules and matching someone to a degree that they are pleased with,” Greenwood says.

“Encouraging students so that they can be involved in sports in many different ways, not only through sports science, is a huge part of what we do,” he says.

STUDENT ATHLETES ARE ENCOURAGED to also look at other degrees that will allow them to follow a career in sport. For example, by studying teaching they can become a coach, studying management can lead to them managing sports teams in future, and psychology can help them become an academic coordinator in sports or provide counselling to athletes.

“THE POSSIBILITIES ARE LIMITLESS,” elaborates Greenwood. “At UWC, the added hurdles student athletes need to overcome and the time they spend on sports [training] require that we provide specialised support to them. We are constantly striving to improve the services we provide to make students as employable as possible. We do this by collaborating with Coursera and Saylor Academy to upskill a range of both hard and soft skills that we deem critical to their employability. We have a holistic approach when it comes to helping sports students that goes as far as helping them obtain their driver’s licences.”

HE SAYS IT BRINGS HIM GREAT JOY to see “some of our sports students go on to play professionally for Banyana Banyana, the Springboks, and in the Currie Cup and the Super League.

“Athletes at such a high level require a high amount of selfdiscipline and they must be able to apply that self-discipline to their academics and have a solid work ethic in order to go on to achieve a degree,” concludes Greenwood.