7 a.m. – Shoot hoops with an All-American before breakfast.

3:15 p.m. – Workout beside Olympic gymnasts.

11:45 p.m. – Turn to my 300-pound lineman for security purposes.

Athletes4hire.com had so much potential. Alas, the Web site doesn’t rent out star athletes for the day, as the name loosely suggests. So much for my sport-fueled euphoria.

The company, which advertises around campus, actually markets the skills of graduated college athletes to corporate America. They are one of many firms capitalizing on the profit potential of peddling post-college letter winners to businesses eager for employees with valuable athlete characteristics.

It’s a solid business plan. Athletic experience rapidly develops the ability to lead, work under pressure and multi-task. It demands intense determination and passionate pursuit of team-oriented goals.

Employers can always teach their workers to do a specific job. But these intangible attributes – hard work, stress management, tenacity – are vital to success in the professional world.

So with the new athletic academic center still under construction and gripes about educational shortcomings of our campus jocks, why do they sound so much more prepared for life after college than your average student?

Chalk this one up to an increasingly lame off-the-field extracurricular lineup.

Members of Econ Club can’t debate fiscal policy until they vomit. GSB spends as much time “governing” each week as most players spend doing calf raises.

If the rest of us devoted nearly as much time and energy toward our organizations as student athletes do to theirs, we might see more noticeable accomplishments and more capable students emerging from our campus.

Most groups start with a major or an interest. They attach “club” to the end of it and proceed to tout the endeavor as a worthwhile activity, building character and leadership skills. I don’t think so.

Campus organizations are notorious for handing out mountains of fluffy executive titles and demanding very little in return. They spend more time planning hokey day trips or local speakers than they do accomplishing, well, anything important.

They also spend our money – and lots of it. When $17,000 dollars of student fees goes to a club showing free movies very near, if not past their DVD release date, it seems a little wasteful. Others laugh off the fact they use their multi-thousand dollar budgets for nothing more than free pizza.

Since there are no sports pundits or rabid fans riding their tails, someone needs to hold these groups accountable. If they want to receive money, they have to produce.

Clubs centered around majors should work to develop a group research project on a provocative and pertinent topic that has yet to be explored. The “club athletes” should host youth camps or organize leagues for younger kids in the community. And engineering societies should actually build things for the community or design a useful product they can market to their fellow students.

Hint: I don’t need a canoe made from concrete.

College sports teams face constant public ridicule if they don’t exert 110 percent during competition. In the classroom, their special academic treatment can’t be anymore helpful than the file cabinets brimming with exams that reside in most greek houses. At least they have a good reason to be too tired for homework.

At the end of the day, they’ve developed skills that most students will never attain. You can always train someone how to fill a cubicle once they graduate, but an ability to push oneself and produce under pressure is a different story.

The rest of campus needs to take a page out of the student athlete playbook and start challenging themselves outside the classroom, as well.

Even if we could just hire them off the Internet to do our jobs, the invaluable mentality of these athletes would probably make them too expensive anyway.

– Chris Sigmund in a junior in economics and political science. He is Daily online editor.