0.2% Do It

I was at Valpo's 22nd Annual Student Athlete Academic Banquet tonight where student athletes with cumulative GPA's above 3.25 are honored.  As with most banquets there were several speakers.  One of the speakers was a guy on the golf team and in his speech he mentioned a few statistics:

1. Only about 10% of high school students participate in school athletics, and
2. Only about 2% of that 10% goes on to participate at a collegiate level.

That means that there is 0.2% chance that any student will participate in college athletics.

I want to give a shout out to everyone in that 0.2% for making a commitment to continue to participate in sports.  But in particular I really want to congratulate all my fellow seniors who not only have participated in college athletics, but who have done it for four years.

It sucks right now because it is all coming to an end, but to my senior teammates here at Valpo, Kevin, Steve and Guillermo, you always put so much into practices and the team, and I congratulate you guys on four great years of swimming, school, and oh so much more.

Listening to the speaker tonight I also started to think about my high school teammates.  The ones who went on to swim in college and those who did not. To Sammy, Lauren, Jenny, Andre and everyone else, who have all recently completed your senior swim seasons, I say congrats on beating the odds and continuing to do what you love.

It is not always easy to be a student and an athlete, but we have all beaten the odds, and THAT is pretty awesome.