Reply to Is playing a sport in college "worth it"?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That said, my brother wasted years of his life trying to make the Olympics in his sport.  He spent all of college exclusively focused on that goal.  He missed making an alternate for the team by one slot.  He did graduate from college after 5 years, but with a crap major and a crap GPA.  It's haunted home for years and now in his mid 30s he's still playing catch up.    The dream of an Olympic medal was a huge bust for his life, as I'm sure it is for many.[/quote]

Is it his attitude that he "wasted his life" on a "bust" or is it yours? I don't think he should regret what he did at all. You have to be a tremendous athlete to be "almost" Olympic quality. That is an achievement in and of itself and the effort is by no means wasted. If he hadn't tried to make the team, he'd have spent the rest of his life regretting it.

Plenty of people graduate with crap GPAs in crap majors without doing any sports at all. Then they go on to lead productive and happy lives, because once you have graduated nobody gives a shit what your undergrad major or GPA were.

Some people spend six years getting a PhD and then never become professors. Did they waste years of their life on a huge bust?[/quote]I don't know exactly what he thinks about those years at this point, but I do know that when he missed making the team he was 26.  He had never had time for any other professional ambitions.  He had never thought through his major.  He had missed all chances of getting a college internship to try out careers.  He had a GPA that disqualified him for any serious grad school.  He had nothing but the gym and big muscles.  He tried being a personal trainer briefly, but his clients didn't push themselves hard enough.  He didn't have certifications to train serious athletes....and he didn't want to be a trainer anyways.  If he couldn't play, he was done with his sport.

He is now mid-30s and is just starting to get back on track after floundering for many years.  He feels like he is about a decade behind his peers. At a time when he would like to be buying a house, getting married and having kids, he's still working a minimum wage job and trying to retake classes to get into grad school.  He really wants to be a neuroscientist.  It's been a rough decade for him.  Really rough.  I'm still not sure if the Olympics were really his dream or my father's.  All I know is that he hasn't been happy with his professional or personal life in almost a decade.  Choosing althetics closed many doors for him.[/quote]

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