Seniors in high school are starting to finalize their plans for next year. A few students from North Polk are deciding to continue their sports careers in college. 

Personally, continuing sports in college was never something I thought about until a few months after my senior year started. 

When looking into colleges my junior and sophomore year, I was certain that I was going to go to Mercy College to major in biology and focus on my pre-medicine path. However, I started looking into other possibilities to be able to see what other options there were.

While I was looking into Grand View University, I realized that they had sports that I could possibly participate in. Even though I was hesitant about considering sports as an option, due to the harder classes, I still wanted to look into them because sports have always been a part of my life since I could remember. 

I started reaching out to the Grand View cheer coach, Nick Black, first after some consideration and talking to my parents. Black was excited that I was considering participating in their team. He gave me information about how the team works and how they make sure that practice and competitions do not interfere with classes often.

I then went on a college visit and my tour guide was a girl on the cheer team. I asked her plenty of questions about the team and how everything works. She mentioned that the team also has study groups often for hours to make sure everyone stays on track with their classes while being busy with the season. 

After realizing how much support athletes receive from their teammates, coaches, and professors, doing sports in college seemed attainable. I started reaching out to the track coach as well, to see what he thought about my personal skills and how they could help their track team. He said they are always looking for some new sprinters for their team. 

I then had to have a long conversation with my father about possibly doing both. I am very nervous to be a dual college athlete, but I am very excited to be able to continue the two sports I have loved since before middle school. 

Once coming to the conclusion of doing both, I reached out to the coaches to let them both know that I planned on participating in both sports. My future coaches discussed together about how it would work and they said they have had another young lady do it before.

When going over scholarship information, the coaches based it off of how much I would benefit the team and also took into consideration other scholarships Grand View University was already offering me. 

Although I knew what school I wanted to attend and play sports in, there were other colleges still reaching out to me about sports once they saw I was interested in them. I had several coaches reaching out to me and crunching numbers to see how much they could also offer me and to see if they could persuade me to attend their school instead. They would send me the numbers once they had them all figured out to see how much I would be paying out of pocket every year. After looking over several of these, I still knew I wanted to go to Grand View. 

There are many different ways to look into athletic scholarships, but this was the path I took when looking into them myself. You may think that you are not good enough at your sport to be a collegiate athlete, but if you want to do it, it is not a bad idea to look into them and reach out.