Fall and spring mark the times when students receive the anxiously awaited college admissions letters.

Some people spend all 1,460 days of their high school careers, including summer vacations and other breaks) dedicating their lives to their school work, in order to one day be accepted into the whose banner has hung across their wall since they were five. Others spend only a couple hours a night completing the bare minimum of homework. These two stereotypical students, and all the others in between, do out in hours of working in order to get the grades they do.

And yet, enter: the athlete. Some people believe athletes do little homework and get into colleges merely because of their athletic ability. “I can understand why some students may see it as unfair for someone to get into a school because of a sport, however athletes work really hard to accomplish what they do with their sport in addition to their heavy course load and other extra curricular activities,” said Callie Hiner ’14. Sometimes other students forget that the athletes have just as much on their plate.

“I’m not saying that the athletes are not smart enough to get into the schools they were recruited to, but at the same time I don’t think its entirely fair if it takes away from students who are more academically fit for the school,” said Lindsey Graber ’13. For Graber, and others, as long as the student could get into that same school without the sports, their acceptance is not something that should be fret over.

Athletes that do get recruited for sports often spend hours over many years training in order to be good enough at that sport. “Students who get into schools because of sports have worked really hard over the past four years to play at that level,” Hiner noted. In a way, their training is just like doing homework; it has to be executed successfully in order to get good “grades” for recruitment.

“I don’t think it is unfair for a student to be accepted for a sport because people put a lot of effort into their sports. If they weren’t spending so much time on their sport they could have spent more time working to get good works,” stated Turner Block ’13. As a student going through the recruitment process, Block knows the hard work that must be put forth.

The other students do not always know the hard work these athletes must put forth. As a result, they feel injustice towards these students getting accepted for athletics. “Most often the case is that the person could not have academically gotten into the school and just because someone else is not talented at the sport doesn’t mean they should be rejected from the school of their dreams,” said Shelby Shulman ’12. Schulman does acknowledge that these students put in a lot of hard work, but at the same time brings about the point that other students should not be rejected because they can only offer their academics.

But, after the mailman throws those college letters into the students’ mailboxes, everyone has found the right school for them. Hiner concludes, “Some students are accepted because of stellar academics, some because of special artistic talents and some because of athletic ability. Excelling at any one of those makes a student a very appealing applicant.”