New Friends and the Academic Effects of Redshirting

Luckily for me, one of my new friends who transferred to Trinity from Rollins did not make the team here at Trinity so we decided to train together since I'm just coming back from an injury and it would be a lot more helpful to have another player there to train with. Thus far, I've been training with him every day and we're becoming pretty good friends because his only friends are on the soccer team so I've been the only person he's had to hang out with consistently since I'm redshirting. So it's been benefitting us both by training and hanging out together to make the experience of not playing soccer this year more enjoyable as we are in a similar situation. In addition to this I've been helping him meet others from Trinity to facilitate the process of making friends outside of the soccer team. I also have another friend who transferred to Trinity this year who happens to be on the soccer team but doesn't really have any friends outside the soccer team and I've been hanging out with him a lot as well, mainly one on one, when he's not playing soccer. So I've also been trying to help introduce him to a wider scope of people here at Trinity. I don't know if redshirting has allowed me to become closer to them than playing would but regardless, it's been awesome meeting these two and helping them adjust and enjoy Trinity. Besides having the pleasure of becoming closer to those two than any of the other guys on the team have, I've been noticing that I've been slacking off way more than I usually do. I feel like this is due to not having a major time consuming commitment, such as being on the soccer team, that makes you want to get things done on time. Having soccer practice every day induces an extra awareness and urgency to get things done so not having that urgency has been an adverse affect of not playing with the team. Although I have been training every day it is completely up to me when I want to train and how I want to train, so that decreases that urgency that I usually have that helps me with my studies. Hopefully I'll overcome this need for urgency to work on my studies more efficiently as I become more accustomed to not playing high intensity soccer every day.