Extracurricular Activities Help Students With Their Academics

At the start of each new sports season, many students choose to get involved in extracurricular activities. With these extracurricular commitments taking up much of students’ time, many assume that some students will find it difficult to keep up with their academic requirements. Interestingly enough, some students have found that they perform better academically when they are participating in extracurricular activities.

Camilo Calvo, a sophomore and track runner, began running indoor track in the winter of his freshman year, and believes that he performs better academically during track season. He said that he has less time to spend on exploring the Internet, which forces him to start his homework as soon as he gets home. Calvo also said that he is able to “decloud” his head when he runswhich helps him to focus on the task at hand immediately after practice is over every day.

“I feel that I do better in school when I am running,” said Calvo. “I regret not running for WJ sooner, since I missed the first cross country season of my high school career.”

Calvo said that the fall season of cross country or “XC” is now his favorite sports season because it is all long distance, which is his specialty. Calvo said that he plans to continue running track and cross country until he graduates, partially because he benefits academically from it.

Taj Keshav, a senior and the president of the It’s Academic/Quizbowl Team, agrees with Calvo that extracurricular activities help academic performance. However, Keshav finds that the knowledge that he gains from studying for Quizbowl, rather than tight time constraints, can help him academically.

“I’m not the best at Quizbowl, but it’s really fun and it helps me with more difficult AP classes,” said Keshav.

Keshav mostly studies for Quizbowl in science- and math-related categories, but also likes to branch out a little and study other subjects, such as literature.

“Even though our team already [has] players who specialize in literature, I like to read short stories or poems,” said Keshav. “[I] can help out the team if I read more obscure literature and it is also really interesting and relaxing.”

He said that that aspect of “relaxing” possibly helps him to perform better academically as well. Overall, Keshav feels that Quizbowl gives him an academic advantage because when learning about subjects such as literature, history and science, he had more knowledge on these subjects.

Sophomore Alex LaFontaine  said that his extracurricular of choice, baseball, also helps him academically.

“Last year my GPA jumped by a whole letter grade the second semester,” said LaFontaine. “I assume it was because of baseball.”

His reasoning as to why he had more academic success during baseball season was also similar to Calvo’s.

“When I got home every day I [had] to get right to [work], which was great for me since I sometimes have trouble getting to work,” said LaFontaine.

LaFontaine hopes to have the same positive results second semester this year that he had last year.

For these students, extracurricular activities that they participated in, such as sports teams and Quizbowl, helped them to better manage their time and work to the best of their abilities.

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