GOAL SETTING FOR STUDENT ATHLETES

Setting goals is essential to pursuing your dreams.

When you take responsibility for your own development, big things happen. No one is doing it for you, you are invested in yourself and your future.

S.M.A.R.T.

is a well known acronym to help with goal setting.

Specific

Be specific!

Depending on where you are at in the recruiting process, be as specific as you can right now.

A few things to think about getting specific:

How far from home?

How much time do you want to spend in college on a sport?

Big school? Small school?

Measurable

How can you measure your current situation to where you want to be?

In other words?

Are you looking at high end programs, but yet your not a big contributor to your team?

Are looking at a high end academic school, but your grades and board scores don't measure up to where you're looking?

These are measurable items.

We want to use the sport to help stretch but we want to look at the measurable to see if we are in the right stratosphere

Attainable

Looking forward are the goals attainable?

For the most part- yes!

If there are huge obstacles like the school you're looking at is a plane ride away or across an ocean, maybe you pause and think, but likely still attainable.

If your grades or board scores aren't where you want, you can work harder, get a tutor, ask for help. Again possibly attainable.

If the school is financially out of the question, and seems unattainable, you can research all options, local scholarships, grants, work study, the list goes on. Again, possibly attainable.

Relevant/Realistic

Realistic is more applicable.

Are your goals realistic? Just look to your "M", the measurable are helpful in determining the reality of your goal plan.

The sky is always the limit. Why not shoot high, but with a "realistic" piece of the plan. You can always adjust the target.

If you started early this is a bit harder to pin down, if you're a bit later in the process, you can get a strong idea of the reality of your wish list. Go back to your measurable and see if your goals match with them.

Timely

This is obvious, right? For goodness sake, this is the "easy" part! Be timely.

Get the goals set, go through each letter of the above acronym then make a plan with calendar! Set reminders if that helps.

Be timely with sending film, emails, all correspondence necessary to start the process.

You are only hurting yourself, if you have worked hard on and off the field and then take a break on getting the absolute fundamentals of your goal plan in gear!

Being timely is a controllable, so take control of your future!

Goal setting does take time, but you will never have any regrets if you take the time now to set goals, develop a plan to achieve, and execute!

Enlist help everywhere you need it, on and off the field.