This is a crazy time of year for any sports fan. It is especially tricky for college students and according to Gallup, seventy two percent of eighteen to twenty nine year olds claim to be sports fans. It is clear that many fans are probably college students. One might ask themselves, “How can I possibly keep up with homework when all these sports are going on?” There’s the NFL playoffs entering the second round, the NCAA Football National championship and bowl mania just passed, NBA is gaining heat with the all-star game approaching and Hockey is getting ready to begin their playoffs. Don’t worry college students because The Siskiyou is here to offer you the five best ways to balance fandom and school.
1)Get a smartphone that can handle sports apps and sports alerts.
There are countless sports apps which send alerts like game updates, injuries and trades just like a text. One can even set which teams and player they want to receive alerts for. Most of these apps also allow users to watch game highlight, analysis of games and live tracking. This cuts tracking sports down from an hour of Sportscenter to a quick minute check of the phone. According to BusinessInsider, The 7 best sport apps for fans are ESPN ScoreCenter, MLB.com at bat, Nike+, Watch ESPN, Yahoo, Scoremobile and Yahoo Fantasy Football.
2) Find the best way to multi-task.
According to Michigan Flint University, college students should spend twenty four to thirty six hours a week on studying for every twelve credit hours. Now, everyone says don’t multi-task while studying. However, it’s deeply ingrained in our genetics to do it anyway. Just find the best way that works for you, whether it’s a sports talk show on the radio to listening to Sportscenter as background noise, it all works. Plus they say a college student needs a break for every 15 minutes of studying right? This method of multi-tasking can be applied in other areas like listening to podcasts while walking/driving to work, playing sports radio while cleaning or even checking up on your favorite team while waiting in line.
Sports fanatics like Phil Knox, a senior at SOU who has been playing fantasy basketball and football for 4 years now, takes multitasking to a whole other level when watching sports. “Oh ya, I keep it real with my multitasking skills, I’ll be streaming the NFL game on my laptop, the college hoop game on my Xbox and the NBA game from my phone.” Either way you look at it, multi-tasking is key for any sports fan that is a college student.
3) Find someone with cable (that allows you to stream it on other devices).
This one is so high on the list because it’s free and more reliable than those free streaming websites online. Over eighty three percent of households in the U.S. have some sort of form of cable in them according to, International Business Times. So, maybe your parents don’t have cable, but it’s likely you’ll know someone who does. Once you find this person, do anything you can to get them to allow you access to their login info. I personally clean my sister’s house once a week so she will let me use her’s.
4) Find the most reliable online streaming website for sports.
There are many of these out there that stream all sporting events and are free. However, some of these sites require credit cards, don’t stream properly or are so blocked by ads that a person could never get to the website anyway. There are a few out there that work pretty well with a very reliable wifi connection and computer, but the picture is far from HD. One of the best ones that I use is FrontRowSports. It’s easy to find, no credit card needed and is relatively light on ads (compared to most). Some others are SportLemon, Stream2Watch and BossCast. Also, some TV networks will stream certain events for free or offer a way to track them. For example ESPN app allows anyone to listen to any game for free and CBS will allow anyone to watch NCAA tournament games broadcasted on their channel for free. The only way to find out about these free online websites is by carefully researching and keep researching.
5) Find a couple sport podcasts and listen to them daily.
This one is so low on the list because it’s time consuming and not everyone wants to listen to them daily. Most sports podcasts are free and run daily shows. Every show, they break down different hot topics going on in sports, making tracking the daily sport trends easier. One can also find podcasts on any specific team or city for multiple teams. This makes it a lot easier to follow certain teams or cities. Again, it is time consuming and most college students don’t have the time to keep up on daily podcasts. However, it can be done while multitasking to make it easier. There are so many podcasts from various resources and are the easiest way to keep up with day to day happenings in the sports world.
The sporting world isn’t slowing down anytime soon and neither is this term. It is very easy to put sports first and fall behind in school when there seems to be a big game on T.V. Everyday. We here at The Siskiyou hope these tips can help you balance school and keeping up on sports.
