Between School and Extra Curriculars

Every year, students sign up for extracurricular activities including band, color guard, water polo, swimming, wrestling, football and more. Lahainaluna’s school website lists 23 clubs and 21 sports. Many of them take up time after school and even during weekends. For instance, water polo. This can fill up a student’s schedule as long hours are spent practicing five days a week. Games are on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and sometimes Saturdays.

The hours students spend on sports and extracurriculars could be spent with family and friends, doing homework, or sleeping. But for some reason, students commit to their extracurriculars.

“I forget all about it”

Researcher Erin Massoni finds that extracurricular activities have a positive impact on mood, behavior, grades, and school and assignment completion.  For Massoni, extracurriculars encourage the development of skills that help teenagers take more initiative and socialize. Yet, what happens when extracurriculars take more than they give? What happens when extracurricular activities negatively impact school performance and home life?

Students are outspoken on the benefits of extracurriculars to their mental health. “Wrestling helps me relieve my stress because, like, after school, I'll be all anxious,” says sophomore Safirah Ladore who gets stress from school. She describes feeling “like, oh, I need to go home, I need to do this, I need to do that. But then when I go to wrestling, I forget all about it.”

Similarly, dancing after school helps freshman Eli Hegrenes “release emotions in a positive way.” Hengrenes uses his dance time to “express how I feel [...]. I can use different shapes to express my feelings.”

Being a part of a team or club can also give students a safe place and sense of belonging. At a new school this year, sophomore Isabella Higgins reflects on how being part of a team helped her fit in. “The team was very kind, and they welcomed me.”

Striking a Balance

Junior Cora Gruber agrees with this idea, and said “I love the girls, and the team is like another family to me.” Yet, Gruber   worries about finding a balance between school and extracurriculars. “I get stressed out about performing physically and mentally, like in my sport and in my school,” she admits. “Academics and grade checks make it more stressful.”

According to Lahainaluna’s grade check policy, students cannot participate in games or meets with an F or a GPA below 2.0. Students who do not meet these requirements will be in Academic Review Status (ARS) and will have to attend study hall on Wednesdays until they bring their grades up.

“There's only a few that don't pass grade checks,” says Sabine Armstrong, the school's Athletic Department Assistant. “It's not because they're not smart students. It's because they don't manage their time well.”  Students may have a lot of things they need to balance, Armstrong says: “They want to practice, and they have maybe a job, and they have school, and then they don't hand in their assignments.”

Time management gets easier, said Armstrong. She pointed out that  “Those people that are on ARS, most of them, a good percentage of them, are freshmen.” She added that this may be because they are new to high school and “don't know, and they–it's overwhelming.”  In contrast to Freshmen, Armstrong said, “seniors take us more seriously, because they know it's time for college or time for trade school, and they need, you know, everything. So they have their time more managed than the freshman for sure.”

“When I get off of school I feel very stressed out because I just have a lot of homework, and when I have to go to wrestling after, it just makes it very hard to do my work and get it done,” says freshman Reef Harris. Despite the stress, Harris is confident that “I can get my grades up in time whenever there's a grade check. But sometimes it stressing me out.”

Junior Ozzy Serle says that “The hard thing is just balancing it, honestly.” Serle, a basketball player, explains that “Our day starts from 7:45. We don't get home to, what, like eight? Seven? Then you have to eat, shower—then you have to find time to do your homework.” Serle finds that when it comes to homework “you usually do it all [on] the weekends or during school. It's mainly about just managing your time.”

Losing Sleep Over It

Sophomore Jenna Basto commits two to three days a week to her color guard practice, which lasts 4-5 hours.  Despite this commitment, she still manages to find “like an hour or two” for her homework.

Hegrenes finds that he spends “more time dancing than doing homework.” He spends three hours doing his homework, which he compared to the two to six hours he spends at dance. Dance can be very stressful, he admitted, since “It takes up so much time.” “I usually go to bed late because of my homework. I usually go to bed around 12 or 1am.”

Gruber finds that she gets less sleep during water polo season because she often won’t get home until 8:00 - 8:30, “and I still have to eat dinner, get ready for bed, do homework, and get ready for bed the next day.”

Importantly, the CDC recommends that teenagers aged 13–18 years  sleep 8–10 hours per 24 every hour period. Yet, the students interviewed reported an average of 6 hours per night.

When the average day is calculated, (figure 1), students without extracurricular activities have 4.3 hrs of unused time. Yet, when practice time is added (figure 2) students only have 1.5 hrs of unused time. We might image unused time as open time that students could spend doing things like eating, talking to others, or taking care of an unexpected event or an emergency. Students in extracurriculars may not have this time or may need to lose time for eating, resting, or, again, sleep.

Despite the time crunch, sophomore Safirah Ladore tries to stick to her sleep schedule. Safirah is a wrestler. “I try to just cut my line and go to sleep at nine or ten.” But for her, she added, “honestly, that's late for me, because I go to sleep at like eight o'clock.”

One reason she is able to go to bed early the way she manages her time. She says she does homework for “like an hour to two hours like a night.” This depends on how much she is able to finish before her practice begins. “If I'm more productive after school,” she added, “I'll get, like, another hour or 30 minutes.”

“...that’s every other kid…”

While students like Safirah are able to balance work and play, many other LHS students struggle. During the 2024 fall season, for instance, JV football was affected by player injuries but also time management issues when critical players were unable to pass their grade checks.

“It got so bad,” said sophomore Corbin Sales, “that some people just gave up completely and just accepted the fact that they won't be able to play.” JV had to forfeit their game because of “grades and injuries” Sales says. “We didn’t have a lot of people in the first place. It really just messed everything up.”

“There was injuries,” says Armstrong. “A lot of people had injuries, and a lot of people that didn't make the grades. So the combination between both of it, I think, was then we didn't have enough players for a JV team.”  She was sure to clarify that “it wasn't just the grades, or it wasn't just the injuries, I think it was a combination of both things that then resulted into the team that having enough players to safely play.”

Freshman Cruz Dagupion played JV football this fall. “I couldn't really manage it,” he said. “It was just too hard.” Dagupion found “there's no time for anything because, like, once you're out of school, it's like, either weightlifting or you're just in the locker room waiting.” It was also hard because “when you get home, it's around like nine o'clock.”

During the season, “I couldn't get my grade up in time,” Dagupion said, who thinks that the homework load is “Kind of too much for me. But I think that's good, because it kind of helps you learn what you can perform.”

Junior Daniel Bandayrel doesn’t play any sports but still struggles with time management.  “I just space out bruh,” said Bandayrel, who believes “The damn truth is that’s every other kid.” “I ain’t gonna lie,” he emphasized, “like have you ever noticed your classmates spacing the &@#% out?”

“I manage my time by putting school first, before anything else,” said junior Timote Lino. Timote has become one of the student musicians that leads the alma mater at practice and assemblies. Despite this commitment to practices and performances, he believes that “education is most important.”

Lino says managing his time becomes difficult when “I’m starting to run gigs with my band.” To fit everything in, Lino has to “time crunch everything to finish school work and then get to the gig right after.”

Commitment or Excuse?

History teacher Sarah Eubank thinks that “most of the time, the kids are using sports as an excuse to not do things that they don't want to do.” Eubank notices “When the sports over, they just continue to not do it, but now they don't have an excuse.” She feels that “they could get work turned in,” but “most of the time it’s a kid who doesn't really want to do a thing because it's hard to choose to do the thing that's that not that fun.”

Eubank sometimes notices that students “might be tired, and maybe sometimes quality drops a little bit because they don't have as much time to put towards the thing.”

Eubank notices a trend when the sports end. “The emphasis is to make sure you're passing so that you can play the sport, and then when the sport is done, a lot of the times boys grades do drop off a little bit.” After the season, “They struggle because they no longer care.”

Differently, sophomore Basto insists that when students prioritize sports they are standing on business. “I do it because I was like, committed to like doing it.”  “And, like, I don’t think I could like, back out.” Jenna is also committed because “I think the experience is really nice.”

“I feel very stressed by dance,” Hegrenes said. “It takes up so much time, but since I’m so passionate about about it, I don’t want to let it go.”