I am posting this as an alternative view of how hard our kids have it.
Son and I talk about the same things regarding if he didn't have baseball in college - how much free time he would have.
Son sometimes likes to reflect on his late Grandfather's life when he was this age. Grandpa was very busy too during his college age period. He was busy following Patton around to N. Africa, Sicily, Italy, Southern France and Germany. Grandpa used to tell him of the time in Sicily he went for 3 weeks without changing his underwear. Said that he always changed his socks, but had no time to change his shorts, they were too busy humping up to Palermo.
Makes me think of CPLZ's son and other sons who are going through the service acadamies, and all of the soldiers male and female that have given themselves for my freedom. My son considered that for a while, but Mom didn't want to let him go. So we all pause as often as possible and thank God for their service.
Whenever my son grouses about being tired from baseball and school, I remind him where else and what else he could be doing at this time.
Here is a short blurb on what one soldier in Iraq's day is like:
Typical day on the Ground by a simple soldier named Smith:
"We’ve been busy, busy, busy. Early mornings, long days, and hot weather (135F on Sunday) were my companions these past few days. We are now going on missions with the IA. They do raids with coalition forces help, and we watch them to make sure they don’t mess up. Our goal is to approve them as “ready to go on their own” so that coalition forces can leave the country to the Iraqi security forces. We performed around 4 raids these past few days, back to back. We searched around 12 villages, some as large as 8,000 people. We cordoned them off and searched each and every house. We found LOTS of stuff. I’m sure we have prevented countless deaths throughout the country. We blew up a cache of weapons the first day that consisted of a dozen RPG’s, over 200 mortar and rocket rounds, 3 AK47’s, thousands of rounds of ammo, Motorola radios for detonating IED’s, spools of wire, and other IED making materials. The next couple days were more of the same. I’m not sure how many people we detained, but it should have been a lot more. It’s tough with the IA because they will tell their buddies we are coming, and we find that a lot of terrorists are long gone by the time we get there. You know how quickly word spreads in small towns. We are working to rectify the situation though, so it won’t be a problem for long."
I don't mean to diminish the hard life of a college baseball player -- I just think it is a matter of perspective to help them get through it.