Past, Present, and Future for Student Athletes

According to the size of territory, South Korea is 109th country in the world. However, the result become reversed in sport. In Rio Olympics, Korea took 8th among the nations. In addition, it has been in top ten over the last five successive Games. Though, there are several negative sides behind the victory; over training, missing classes, and the life after the games.

Most student athletes in Korea train about five hours per day with one day break a week. If you're a member of national team, you may train more than seven hours a day even though you're a student. It's one of the reasons that Korean athletes are competitive around the world. However, it causes not only injuries but burnout at the same time.

Because of training sessions, many athletes miss their classes in school. They usually skip their afternoon classes. Furthermore, when there is a national championship, some of them don't go to school in order to practice both in the morning and the afternoon. In addition, they sometimes go to other regions to train for a long period. Those let student athletes hard to follow their study in school.

As a result, it's difficult for athletes to get a job when they retire. There are limited positions of coach. Moreover, they're usually less educated than ordinary students. So, when they compete in a job market for positions, they don't have much competitive edge. Even though, retired athletes try to study or learn specific skills like English, computer, and networking, it may take lots of time and be too late to get a nice position.

People started considering about that issue. Excellence in sports is important, but it's not the only one that is in our lives. So, our government began making policies to protect student athletes. I hope that the changes make them keep having interest for training, form healthy culture connecting between sports and academic aspects, and expand what they've learnt through sports into the other parts of our lives.

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