How College Sports Killed Summer Vacation

The day began for the Clemson men’s soccer team at 7 a.m., with workouts focused on improving agility, sprinting and technique. A weight room session followed. Next came classes. In the evening there was finally time to kick back with friends and video games, and to rest up for the next morning.

This was July 23, more than two full weeks before preseason formally begins next Wednesday, and a month before the Tigers’ first regular-season game.

And this grueling schedule actually constituted “an easier day for us,” the junior Tanner Dieterich said.

“We don’t want to waste any time,” he added.

College sports fans are inured to the notion of top-notch football teams spending their summers on campus. After all, football is a strikingly high-exposure sport, worth billions of dollars to the colleges and, eventually, millions to the best of the players if they sign with a pro team.

But in recent years, many lower-profile college sports have become virtually year-round affairs, too. Athletes routinely forgo summer break to remain on campus and hone their skills as they work jobs or internships that they do not have time for during the traditional academic year. Others take classes that will minimize their academic burden during their competitive seasons.

“I think it’s the norm now,” said Taryn Kloth, a senior volleyball player at Creighton, who is spending her summer on campus in Omaha working on an independent study in finance. “You almost feel as though you’re behind if you’re not.”

It does not matter whether sports generate profits or much exposure for their athletic departments or their universities, or if the sports typically provide professional opportunities for their athletes after graduation. Coaches demand players who are driven to get the best out of themselves, and such personalities naturally believe only year-round training will produce that.

“We’re expected to come back Sept. 17, the day we report, in our best shape,” said Gracie Kramer, a junior on U.C.L.A.’s gymnastics team.

Kramer was on campus last week taking an intensive six-week course in Croatian, strategically getting her language requirement out of the way over the summer rather than spreading it out over three quarters during the school year.

“If you know what to expect for preseason, you know you have to kick your butt in the off-season,” Kramer said. “If you don’t, you’re out of luck: You have to accept the consequences of not making lineups, not being able to compete as much as you want.”

So each day Kramer, whose events include the vault and the floor exercise, arrives at the gym before 8 a.m. and does what she termed, pun unintended, a “flexible” workout for a few hours. She prefers the “nice open gym” at U.C.L.A. as opposed to the gym she would use near her childhood home a couple of hours away, one that she would need to share with local club teams.

Peter Roby, formerly Northeastern’s athletic director and a member of the Knight Commission, which works to reform college sports, said the trend had paid dividends, especially in football and men’s basketball, in the form of higher graduation rates, as athletes effectively have more time to take and pass the required classloads. But he also sounded a note of caution.

“If the athletes don’t have the chance to take time off, that’s where they start to get burned out, injuries start to happen,” he said. “And that’s why you may have athletes who feel they should be paid — because they never get any time off.”

The year-round phenomenon in some of these sports is relatively recent, said Kathy DeBoer, the executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association. These days, she estimated, three-quarters of women’s college volleyball teams have most or all of their players on campus for much of the summer.

As college sports expenses have skyrocketed in recent decades (a trend driven at the largest universities by skyrocketing media revenues for football and men’s basketball), athletic departments have been incentivized to encourage athletes to stay on campus as much as possible, DeBoer said. The more time they spend on campus, the thinking goes, the more likely they will take enough classes to graduate in four years. The funding necessary to allow athletes to train over the summer, according to DeBoer, pales in comparison to carrying their scholarships into a fifth year or even a ninth semester, when they may no longer be eligible for intercollegiate competition.

“It makes sense for the athletics department to have them graduate in four years, because that’s the window on their eligibility,” she said.

Those financial interests align with the competitive interests of coaches. In an N.C.A.A. survey published in 2016, the majority of Division I coaches supported requiring athletic activities after the season. The response from athletes was more mixed.

“I think the majority of coaches would probably say they would like to have their team around all year,” said Connie Price-Smith, Mississippi’s track and field coach.

DeBoer, who used to be Kentucky’s volleyball coach, explained coaches’ thinking: “If I’m a volleyball player and I’m in charge of my own conditioning in the summertime, or have 10 teammates also in the weight room or on the track, I’m going to work a lot harder with the 10 teammates.”

This applies even in more individual sports. Bianca Alonzo, a senior from Los Angeles who runs cross-country and track for Columbia, spent nine weeks this summer in Manhattan, interning at a nonprofit downtown by day and running, lifting and cooking with teammates uptown at night.

“It was nice not to be in a rush through my workouts and cross-training, since I didn’t have the pressures of school or other things around me,” she said.

Many summer workouts must be informal, because N.C.A.A. rules generally bar contact between coaches and players during long off-season dead periods. (There are also limits on supervised training.)

The workouts are supposed to be voluntary. Alonzo said her coaches sent the team sheets with recommended mileages and workouts at the beginning of the summer; Dieterich emphasized that Clemson players made the decision to return by the last week in June and train during the second summer session in player-led practices.

Strength coaches may see athletes for more of the year, though (and may also talk to those athletes’ coaches). And in some sports, a team can take an international trip over the summer, including practices and exhibition games, every four years.

Men’s basketball teams are the most notorious exploiters of the international-trips rule: for instance, Kentucky is heading to the Bahamas in early August. Yet teams in other sports see the benefit as well. Creighton’s volleyball squad traveled to — and played volleyball in — the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary and Italy in June. Upon their return, coaches advised players to step away from spiking for a few weeks, said Kloth, which the players by and large did before returning to informal practices on July 9.

“We’re all really competitive and we don’t want to sit down and give up volleyball,” she said.

The summer sports toil even has trickled down to incoming freshmen, some of whom now enroll over the summer to get a jump-start with their new teams even though their nonathlete classmates might not even arrive on campus for a few more months.

Kathleen Alcorn said that her daughter, Mikayla, graduated from high school in New York this summer on a Friday, traveled to Pittsburgh the next day and began training with Pitt’s women’s soccer team on the following Monday.

“It’s not mandatory, but the university recommends it for all freshmen athletes, and certainly in the fall sports,” she said.

“She’s talking about next summer now,” Alcorn added of her daughter, “about how she can take another summer class, maybe an internship in Pittsburgh, or some other solution. But she wants to be on campus training.”