High school wellness is designed to instill balance into one’s life and develop a healthy lifestyle. The once a week system of class during one’s free hour is supposed to give them a break from the grind of day to day life by giving them something physical to do. While in concept a great idea, for student athletes, the truth about wellness is that it is redundant and unnecessary. “Athletes already get a workout from their sports, and doing a wellness activity is pointless and can actually damage our athletic performance,” swimmer Amelia Backes said.

Student athletes devote hours every single day to their sport. They have tournaments on the weekends, morning practices, and practices that go late into the night. They balance the workload of other students while exercising, training, and competing at the varsity level six to seven days a week. There is no time for procrastination. In fact, there is no time for anything else. The ability to balance homework with the demands of sport are key to a student’s success. Every minute is needed to get a headstart on the grind of high school homework, projects, studying for tests, and writing essays.

As a three sport varsity athlete, I spend nearly every day training, competing, or recovering from competition. I live an active lifestyle, and the requirement to go to Wellness destroys time management for the day because I waste my time.  I don’t need forty minutes of basketball when I have two hours of physical activity every single day. The ideal that Wellness classes will destress myself is completely false——it wastes time that I could be using to do important and useful schoolwork.

This sentiment is shared by student athletes around the school. “Our practices are longer than one wellness period and doing forty minutes of extra activity won’t make a difference in our week. We practice so much that we don’t have time for homework,” senior football and baseball player Tino Fialo said.

Wellness does not increase our wellness; rather, it diminishes us, increases stress levels, decreases productivity, and angers students when their wellness hour conflicts with important tests that need to be studied for and essays that need to be written.