Focus is on the student in ‘student-athlete’

If you’re going to compete academically, who better to have on your side than student athletes?

The Golden Bears and Pandas have been locked in a competition that has waged for 16 years, or since they started celebrating Academic All-Canadians, to see which Canadian university best combines sports and academics.

One gauge is to simply count the number of CIS Academic All-Canadians - student-athletes who have achieved an academic standing of 80 per cent or better while playing on one of their university’s varsity teams.

By this measuring stick, the Golden Bears and Pandas are neck-and-neck with the McGill Redmen in the 51-school rankings. After U of A’s 103 Academic All-Canadians from the 2006-07 fall/winter school year are tallied in, the score sits McGill 1,529 - U of A 1,477.

However, when trying to account for the best student-athlete experience, director of athletics Dale Schulha says it would be wrong if national championships weren’t factored in.

The score there: U of A, 37 - McGill 1. “That’s why we like to say we feel we have the best varsity athletic programs in the country,” said Schulha. “When you look at how our students excel in the classroom and how they excel in their competitive areas, there’s not much comparison.”

Being just one of five schools with the full complement of CIS teams (21, with 25 varsity teams overall) and 500 student athletes, Schulha admits the numbers of Academic All-Canadians is going to be higher, but he said there’s more to it than that.

“When we recruit we want students to put the emphasis on academics, we don’t want one-year wonders being with us for a year, failing out and then having to move on. That doesn’t build our program in the long run,” said Schulha. “There is a tie between athletics and academics. The better the students can do academically and be productive, the better for our athletics program.”

Another factor at work is, if you have a good academic institution you are going to have some good academic athletes, said Schulha. “There is some filtering here,” he said. “It’s a first-class institution to begin with, so we get very high-achieving students to begin with.”

Mike McTeague, associate director of athletics, says the U of A has some programs in place to help students balance academics and athletics.

“What we have implemented over the year is first-year and transfer students can go through academic support sessions at the beginning of the year,” said McTeague.

“The athletics department has booked a lab over on the east wing and worked with academic support services on campus to put together a WebCT program that outlines all the different time-management skills, study skills, exam strategies - all these things that we feel give our student athlete a solid foundation to build on.”

Of all the skills, Schulha said time management is the most critical attribute a student-athlete needs to learn. “They’re full-time students and they’re highly committed full-time athletes, so the amount of training they do - then during the season all the travel - they’re away three or four days at a time. They have to be very organized and efficient to attain and maintain very good grades over their courses,” said Schulha. “You look at their training requirements, their competitive requirement, their academic requirements and then some still have to have part-time jobs, it’s amazing what they do.”

“And certainly, they have to set some priorities and make some choices. It’s safe to say they won’t have near the social life that the average student tends to have.”