They do—but it’s probably not the pants.
After four years as a student-athlete, my body has been dragged through the mud. My muscles have felt exhausted beyond reason with ice baths as the only cure. My weight has fluctuated over a span of numbers that I don’t care to remember, and I have had surgery to fix an ailing rotator cuff that doesn’t seem to want to rotate.
These instances and incidents are to be expected—the path from 18-years-old and devoid of muscle tone to 21 and upping your jean size is to be anticipated as a member of a competitive Division I athletic squad.
We don’t care, because we’re fit to compete. We’re fit to win. But what happens when you hang up the cleats for the last time?
In late November, I was hit with an identity crisis—I was no longer an athlete in competitive sports. I was done. The humid preseason two-a-days were done. The Friday night lights—done. The jump squats, the front squats, the back squats, the J-squats—they weren’t part of my Tuesday or Thursday routine anymore.
Suddenly, I had no justification for wearing sweats to class everyday. I had no justification for having a big dinner. I had no justification for being considered thick. I had no justification for the muscles in my thighs and my hips and my back pockets. I suddenly became a 21-year-old female uncomfortable with the body I’d grown into for my entire life.
Being a college athlete is a privilege bestowed upon those who are willing to work to maintain that distinction. For both men’s and women’s athletics, enduring a four or five-season athletic career takes hard work, fully dedicated and appropriately motivated work, to purposefully show up to the field or court everyday. To put up with a lot of things you don’t want to, to do a lot of things you don’t want to. To do some things that might hurt you, but all the while recognizing that the pain is temporary.
My teammates are strong people, physically and mentally. Stronger than I am, in more ways than one. They are fully capable, fully competent, fully dedicated to the mission that we all signed letters of intent to complete a few years ago. National championship games, rivalry matches, crutching across campus in the rain after injury—these are not small pieces of our lives here. These things are our whole lives.
I am confident that every woman in this athletic department cares immeasurably more about winning than how sweat-drenched her grey t-shirt is during practice or how ragged her ponytail looks by the final game whistle. We work as hard as the boys, and I don’t think that’s disputed—just less publicized. We’re out there when no one knows it. We’re working everyday to make things look effortless—but trust us, effortless is hardly the word.
I’d be hard-pressed to find a student-athlete—or any student, male or female, for that matter—whose body did not endure some measure of physical change throughout their experience. For some, college is kind—the “freshman 15” thins you out instead of bloats you, and you can manage to say that you do, in fact, want fries with that. Maybe you develop a smoothed-out skin tone, your hair unfrizzes itself and you get muscle tone in the right places. I am unsure of the existence of some these things myself, but apparently, people have these gifts bestowed upon them naturally.
For girls like me, after four years of putting weights on your back that weigh more than you, your clothes get tight in all the wrong places and you’re not sure how you ever squeezed into that size two that’s been hanging in your closet since the second semester of your sophomore year. All of the sudden, you’re flipping quickly through old photos, contemplating whether to keep them for motivation or toss them to ensure people have nothing to compare your current figure to. Either way, you’ve changed, and it’s often difficult to juxtapose two ‘you’s.
We’ve heard plenty of times that all bodies are not created equal. We know about the photoshopping of glossy magazine pages, but it’s not the muscles we’re worried about. I’m worried about the pieces of fabric standing in as excuses for clothing that are disheartening to the girls whose shoulders are too broad to pull the blouse over—not because we’re fat, but because we’re strong.
I’m not an athlete anymore, but I still look like one. Maybe you do too. And it’s time we recognize that there’s nothing wrong with that.
As we progress as college students and women and men, we are challenged with the task of adding value to the parts of this University and the parts of this world that we touch. Somewhere in there, we’re meant to add value to ourselves, too, but this is too often a forgotten endeavor when we’re caught up in appeasing the professors and the grades and the job hunt and the Saturday night crowd.
This week is Eating Disorder Awareness Week at Duke. If you haven’t noticed, Duke is fit. Duke is skinny. Sometimes too much so. Over 60 percent of college females have some form of disordered eating, and 95 percent of all eating disorders occur in people between the ages of 12 to 25. We need to recognize this staggering number and start to shift the conversation from simple conversation to actual action.
It might not be you. It could be you. It might have been you once before. Regardless, you are you, and we need to begin to accept that.
Ashley Camano is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Thursday. Send Ashley a message on Twitter @smashleycamando.
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