Time Management: The 18-Hour Days of College Golf

The alarm goes off at 5:45. Strength training at 6:30. Class from nine to one. Lunch eaten walking to the car. Practice or qualifying at two. Finish at dark. Dinner. Study. Sleep. Repeat.

I asked 133 former college golfers how prepared they felt for the volume of practice and training in college. Most said they felt reasonably ready - the number that came back, 3.67 out of 5, looks fine on paper. But the written answers told a different story. Players weren’t unprepared for how much they’d practice. They were unprepared for when and how they’d practice.

The Numbers

Of the 133 who took the survey, 128 rated how prepared they felt for the volume of practice and training demands on a 1 to 5 scale.

- Average preparedness: 3.67 / 5

- Distribution: 1 = 2.3%, 2 = 10.9%, 3 = 25.0%, 4 = 41.4%, 5 = 20.3%

At first glance this looks manageable. The biggest group (41.4%) rated themselves a 4, and only about 13% felt significantly unprepared. So the headline is reassuring: most players knew college golf would be a lot of work, and it was.

The catch is that the volume was almost never the part they complained about. Read the written answers and the problem is the structure of the volume - the order of the day, the lack of control over it, the way it never quite lets up.

The Structure

The surprise isn’t that you’re busy. Most college golfers are ambitious people who compete at a high level, and golf teams - men’s and women’s - are usually near the top of the athletic department in GPA and academic awards. These are organized people. They knew they’d be busy.

The surprise is that you don’t get to choose when you’re busy.

A player from Alabama summed it up in five words: “How little downtime we have.”

One from California: “How many different obligations I had.”

A Norwegian player said the biggest shock was “how busy each day was. Workouts in the morning, classes, practice, then back for homework.”

In junior golf, you run your own schedule. You decide when to practice, how long to stay, whether to lift that day. Tired? Take a day. Playing well? Play more. Struggling? Grind on the range until it clicks.

In college golf, the schedule runs you.

A former player from Texas put it like this: “The timing of each day: workouts in the am right to classes, classes to training in the gym, gym to the course and then back for homework.” One from Oklahoma: “How difficult it was to balance school and golf together.”

The phrase “after class and lift” shows up over and over in the survey. That detail matters more than it looks. In junior golf you usually show up to the course rested, fed, and ready. In college golf you’re often teeing it up in a qualifier with three hours of class and a leg day already behind you.

A few phrases that came up again and again in the written answers:

- “Balancing school and golf” - 8+ mentions

- “How busy” / “how little downtime” - 10+ mentions

- “After class and lift” / “qualifying after class” - 6+ mentions

- “Managing everything” / “juggling” - 5+ mentions

- “Time” as a challenge in general - 20+ mentions

The Four Time Traps

Reading through the open-ended answers, four themes kept surfacing about what makes time management in college golf uniquely hard.

1. You can’t always practice the way you want to

In junior golf, if your swing is off you can spend three hours on the range working through it. In college, if your swing feels off on Tuesday and there’s a qualifier Wednesday, you have two choices: trust it, or panic. There’s rarely time to rebuild.

A player from Maryland: “Getting in block practice as previously maintained my game to scheduled practices varying.” A Texas player: “I wish I had learned to practice more efficiently. In college you have to balance practice, tournaments, qualifying, schoolwork, and a social life.” A Norwegian player was blunt: “I could have worked better at the game by having more structured practice. You don’t have unlimited time in college, so every minute has to count.” And another from Norway: “That our weekly schedule consisted almost exclusively of qualifying rounds and workouts. Practice like putting, short game, and technique was almost fully up to us.”

The players who struggled most were usually the ones who tried to practice the way they had in junior golf - long, unstructured range sessions, aimless putting, chasing swing changes on their own in the middle of the season. Diagnosing a problem quickly and knowing how to practice in tight, purposeful blocks is one of the most valuable skills a junior can build before they ever get to campus.

2. The schedule doesn’t care how you feel

Professional golf is relentless too, but at least a pro controls the calendar. Worn out after three weeks? Skip an event. In college, if there’s a qualifier Monday and a tournament Thursday through Saturday, you’re playing. Tired, sick, stressed about exams - none of it changes the plan.

A player from Colorado: “The consistency of practice was a shock. Constant year-round practice. The amount of schoolwork outside of class. Managing distraction was a nightly task.” One from California: “How exhausted I would constantly be, which lowered my immune system which caused me to constantly be sick.”

A player from Berkeley laid out the full weight of it: “Berkeley is a university that is very academically demanding, and the time spent on practice/qualifiers plus commute meant that finding enough time to study was challenging. Every meal was eaten on the go, and I rarely got 8 hours of sleep.” And a player from Florida said it plainly: “You do not control your schedule anymore. You will play when the team says play, and often on short notice. There is no cherry-picking.”

3. Travel takes more than you think

College teams travel ten to twelve times a year, often Saturday through Tuesday. Some juniors play a similar number of events, but the written answers make it clear a lot of players underestimated the balancing act travel demands - schoolwork on planes, in vans, in hotel rooms, due the day you land.

A player from Washington: “Balancing school, golf and social and wanting to put extra time into golf like I was used to.” One from Texas: “I would say being frustrated that I didn’t meet my own expectations, but also staying caught up in school while traveling for tournaments.”

One of the most honest answers in the whole survey came here: “The loss of a teammate. In February of Freshman year, we lost our teammate in a car accident. Traumatic experience that shaped our team and created a bond that exists 20 years later.” The time demands of college golf aren’t only logistical. You’re managing grief, homesickness, relationships, academics, and your own performance - often all in the same week.

4. The off-season barely exists

In junior golf, most players get a few months where they don’t compete - time to work on the game, play some casual rounds, take the pressure off. College golf has an off-season too, but the answers suggest it feels shorter and more abrupt. The end of the fall semester is usually the only one you get, and December fills up with finals before you’ve caught your breath. Players come back in January and qualifying starts almost immediately.

A player from Arizona: “When the season ends, the practice doesn’t end.”

What the Players Who Handled It Did Differently

Not everyone drowned. The ones who handled the schedule well tended to do two things.

They practiced with structure. A Swedish player: “More structured practice with more analytics during practice to understand where my game was improving.” A Norwegian player: “More structured practice, have a go to practice that you can always do at any time with little thinking.” A Texas player: “Work smarter, more time effective. Not grinding for 6 hours a day. Most of the time 2 hours of practice is all you need.” When you only have two hours, you can’t spend thirty minutes deciding what to work on. The plan has to already exist.

They protected recovery. A German player: “Learn more about recovery in between tournaments, especially when playing 3 to 4 weeks in a row.” A Texas player: “More emphasis on sleep, nutrition, and fitness can really give you an edge.” And the one that stuck with me, from a player who didn’t protect it: “I fell into a slump, started partying and got lost in the mindset and it hurt me.”

How to Prepare

Unless you’re already at a golf academy or on a tightly run junior team, you can’t fully simulate the college schedule. But here’s what you can control before you get there:

Build a practice routine that fits in 90 minutes. Most college practices run two to three hours, but between travel, team meetings, and everything else, you rarely get more than ninety minutes of focused individual work. Get used to having a clear plan you can run inside that window. Designing a few sessions you know work for you is entirely under your control - build them in the last couple of years of high school.

Learn to say no. College is full of pulls on your time: parties, social events, late-night conversations in the dorm. The players who thrived figured out early which invitations to decline. Practice that now.

Protect your sleep. Sleep debt builds fast, and when it catches up, golf is usually the first thing to suffer. One player in the survey rarely got eight hours and named it as a direct hit to his game.

Tell your coaches when you’re drowning. One player wrote: “I wish my coach had been more aware of how much I was struggling with time management. I thought I had to handle it all myself, but I should have asked for help earlier.”

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Next chapter: Academic Workload - More Manageable Than You Think, Until It Isn’t. Why the classroom is rarely the thing that breaks players, and the specific weeks when it does.

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