BELLAIRE • MEMORIAL • RIVER OAKS • TANGLEWOOD • WEST UNIVERSITY

School vs. sports

By Estefania Lopez-Salas, | June 1, 2017

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TIME MANAGEMENT Estefania Lopez-Salas, an incoming seventh grader at River Oaks Baptist School, says balancing school and sports is challenging.

Hard work and determination are key to balancing school and sports. With sports and bunches of homework, you must have a plan for the whole week for everything to work out well.

Most grades at schools have homework, including River Oaks Baptist School, which is where I go to school. That takes up time, with after-school activities that could end late. For example, swim practices at Rice University, which is where I swim, start at 5:45 p.m. and end at 7:45 p.m., which makes me arrive home around 8 p.m., having time to only take a quick shower, eat dinner, brush my teeth and go to bed. With those two hours that are taken out of my study time, I must complete all my homework and study even more for any other graded assignments given. To get this out of the way, doing work on the weekends has been a great help for me. I can get any projects or assignments that are due later in the week over with so I can focus more on sports or after-school activities. This strategy gets most homework out of the way, and it makes my week a less stressful time, where I don’t have to worry about forgetting to complete something.

Everyone has their own opinion. Some say that sports are more important than academics or vice versa, but with hard work you can find yourself at the place in life that you, and only you, want to be in.

In the summer of 2015, when I was 10 years old, I won TAGS (Texas Age Group Champs) in the 50- and 100-meter breaststroke, and this gave me the rank of fourth in the nation. This accomplishment came with practices twice a day, morning and afternoon. This gave me even less time to do homework, but I used my strategy, and it was successful.

School and sports are things that can keep us busy, but we need to learn how to take control and have fun with both.

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