<p>From your experience or that of your child, can anyone comment on which running programs make it pretty tough to balance the team commitment with academics? By this I mean that maybe the runners often have to go an extra year to finish their degree, or tend to feel a lot of psychological stress, or have frequent injuries (from very intense training maybe) requiring PT that saps time also?</p>
<p>Note: this does not imply a criticism of the program. Different strokes for different folks, and kids chose programs based on their personal priorities and abilties.</p>
<p>My friend's daughter switched from UConn to BC because of problems like you mention above. Although, she ended up dropping running altogether due to the difficulty of chronic injury and stress of coursework for PT program.</p>
<p>I think any sport at the DI level is going to be difficult and quite a commitment. My daughter is a DI gymnast and she finds it extremely difficult to balance practice with schoolwork, even though she trained 36 hours/week through high school with a 45 minute drive each way to practice. The college-level training for her sport, at least, is more physically demanding than it was in her club days with early morning running and after practice lifting thrown into the mix. There are always injuries, with subsequent time spent with the trainer.</p>
<p>I run D3, but from my own observation it seems as though a lot of D1 runners redshirt a few seasons and wind up taking 5 years. This is probably in part so that they can spend extra time training, but also would allow the athlete to get by with fewer classes each semester. I've also heard that some D1 programs require their athletes to stay for the summer session both so that they can get in summer training as a team and so that they can get more credits, allowing for more practice time during the school year.</p>
<p>I'm looking at a bunch of different DI running programs and many of my former teammates went on to very good programs and they're all graduating in four years. Coaches work very hard to keep their athletes healthy. Additionally some DI running programs are very bad. Some of the DI programs I looked at are worse than the D3 programs I looked at.</p>