Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series detailing the struggles female student-athletes face as they journey through four years of college athletics toward the end of their playing careers.

For every practice that ISU women’s basketball coach Bill Fennelly runs, he comes prepared with a schedule card. He hands one out to each assistant coach, and keeps one for himself. On the card he has exactly what the team will practice, and when they will do it – down to the minute. Fennelly knows there isn’t a minute to waste, not even in practice, because the four years at Iowa State drain away faster then any player could ever imagine.

“Every kid will say ‘I can’t believe how fast it went,'” Fennelly said. “I still get e-mails from kids that played for me eight years ago, saying ‘I can’t believe how fast it is.’ It’s not going to change; that’s the world we are living in.”

The challenge for Fennelly and all the coaches at Iowa State becomes helping their athletes realize there isn’t another level after this, and their time as an athlete is ticking away.

“As coaches, we’re always telling them ‘Appreciate every day. Work hard every day. Enjoy every moment, because it goes quickly.'” Fennelly said. “You can sit there and look at an 18-year-old freshman, and they just think you’re crazy. What you have to do is you try to get them to understand, which is hard – it is hard for any 18-year-old to understand.”

No matter how much Fennelly emphasized how quickly time flies, former ISU women’s basketball player Megan Ronhovde said it never really sunk in right away, but the message got through.

“It’s like a time clock, and every year that goes by, that’s less time that you’re going to have out on the floor,” Ronhovde said. “Whenever I would start the beginning of the season, I would try to put it into numbers to try and put in perspective just how important each game was. We only have 15 to 16 games that we play at Hilton each year, so you have to take advantage of each opportunity out on the floor.”

When it finally clicks – that this is it – the athletes realize they don’t have much time left to play and they have to make the most of it.

“I think [time] was kind of more motivation, because you do want to leave a legacy,” said senior ISU gymnast Janet Anson. “That motivated me everyday, because I wanted to get more accolades and more honors under my name so people do remember me when I am gone.”

While athletes strive to be the best they can be, the simple fact is that no matter how good they become, their talent as an athlete possibly won’t have bearing on their future career. This situation can put coaches in a precarious position, because on one hand, the team is expected to win, and on the other, they have women that need to be academically ready for the real world. The trick for coaches is helping to facilitate a balance to their athletes.

“[Keeping a balance] is the most important job I have,” Fennelly said.

“[The president and the athletic director] have never said to me, ‘You need to win this many games,’ and it’s important that we do that with our players because this is going to end.”

ISU athletics, as a whole, fosters an academics-first approach, and more importantly, it emphasizes life after college.

“We make it clear in the recruiting process, when we meet with them junior and senior year. They know that were training them to be successful people after school,” said ISU gymnastics coach Jay Ronayne. “We’re not training them to make them successful athletes, because they already are. We just want to make them a little bit better then they were at gymnastics, but we want them to be very successful people.”

The structured atmosphere at Iowa State provides a perfect training ground for college athletes. Each week, an athlete prepares to not only take on the rigors of school, but also their next opponent.

Doing that on a week in, week out basis brings accountability for their actions, but in a safer environment than the outside world.

“To me, winning and learning how to respond to a loss, that’s what’s going to prepare you for your life after this,” said ISU softball coach Stacy Gemeinhardt-Cesler.

“So hopefully if you learn how to deal with the highs and lows of life here, than those blows in life hopefully come a little bit easier and people can deal with them a little bit better then someone that hasn’t been in a competitive situation such as playing a sport in college.”

If you fail to manage your time properly while you’re in college, a loss to your opponent is the only result. But what happens when there are no more opponents and you’re out in the real world?

Fennelly breaking down his practices to the very minute is not just to show how important the time is here in college. He is creating structure that trickles all the way down the finest detail of the women’s lives. It’s that structure that provides a crutch to lean on when the harsh reality strikes that the one constant that has been there for 20 years is suddenly gone.

This article is part of a series. The previous story is available here.