The Mysteries of Lower Campus

For this assignment I decided to use the topic of BYU athletes.  There are currently 580 student athletes at Brigham Young University which only makes up a very small percentage of total student population here at BYU, but it's a small group that not very many people know about.  People know and recognize the starters of the football team and the basketball team.  Maybe the Women's volleyball team or the soccer team.  But beyond that, no one knows the athletes or their lifestyle.  And I doubt anyone thinks about it.   So I decided to step into the separate and mysterious world of lower campus where the athletes live.

(I apologize in advance for my poor photography.  I don't have a camera and the camera on my phone is cracked and scratched so the quality of the pictures I take on my phone is awful.)

I think my five photos show an interesting story.  The first picture is of the athletic academic center.  It's full of BYU athletes studying in the student athletic building.  I did a little bit of research and found that BYU teams annually led the MWC in the number of student-athletes named to the MWC Academic All-MWC student-athlete team.  We had a conference high of 235 student-athletes on the Academic All-MWC team.  A lot of people stereotype athletes as dumb or lazy students who don't care about school because they are only interested in playing sports.  So this was a cool sight to see so many of them getting help from tutors and studying because a lot of people only see them on the court or in the field and forget that they are hard working students as well.  

The second picture is an athlete getting her ankle wrapped with the support of a teammate by her side.  I just thought it was a cool picture that showed the downside of being an athlete and a side of sports that people sometimes forget...because as soon as a player is injured they are easily forgotten.

The third picture is of the men's volleyball team practicing during the early afternoon.  As students, we are in class during the day and don't realize that there are athletes in practice or working out when we are going about an ordinary day.  Another thing that is widely unknown.

The fourth picture is of a dance workshop that was going on Saturday morning.  I went on a weekend to see what happened on lower campus when everyone else was having a weekend off.  There were so many things going on starting super early.  There is constantly people running, the swim and dive team had practice, there were intramurals, the Cougarettes and Cheer Squad were teaching classes.  There is constant activity happening on lower campus.  It never stops.

The last picture was on Halloween.  I was curious as to what athletes did on Halloween, if anything at all.  This is a picture from a Halloween party that was going on in the SFH.  Athletes from all sports team were there handing out candy, playing games, and taking pictures with children from the community.  It was followed by a Women's volleyball game.  It only went to show that BYU student athletes are also reaching out to the community and spending extra time out of their "student life's."

These pictures show a different side to athletics that go beyond the game pictures that everyone is used to.  I wish I could've put some other action photos up but they were super blurry.  But the overall story that these pictures show, is that student athletes are different than other students.  They are busy, hard working, and represent Brigham Young University in our community.  They constantly put in extra time and effort to be good students, athlete, and people.  It was really interesting and neat to me and brought in a new perspective to this campus and school for me.