Balancing Huskie basketball with professional school means living inside two demanding worlds at once.

For Huskie women’s basketball players Gabrielle Kaban, Ella Murphy Wiebe and Gage Grassick, balancing basketball with professional school is a way of life shaped by discipline, trade-offs, exhaustion, resilience and an almost relentless ability to keep moving from one responsibility to the next.

Kaban, a second-year student in Engineering Physics, described her in-season days as almost entirely accounted for from morning until night. “On a typical day during the season, I usually am awake by 7:30, make my coffee and food for the day, and head to my 8:30 class,” she said. 

Between morning and afternoon classes, Kaban heads to the gym for an hour of on-court practice, and an hour weight lifting, then returns to campus for more classes and labs. Later, after a short break to eat and reset, she is back at the gym for film and team practice. “Afterwards, I head home, eat some more, shower and recover, sometimes doing another hour of work before heading to bed.”

Wiebe, who has just completed her fifth and final year of basketball while finishing her third year of mechanical engineering, described a schedule that sounds just as intense. “This semester was my busiest yet,” she said. 

Her days often began with a 7 a.m. lift, followed by classes, individual training, labs, film and two hours on court in the evening before she could turn back to schoolwork.

Grassick, now in her second year of pharmacy after completing a kinesiology degree, put the rhythm of it even more succinctly: “Lift 7-8, Class 8:30-5, practice 6-8, go home and study and do it all over again the next day.”

This repetition is part of what makes the lifestyle so demanding, yet this is what the entire season normally looks like.

Part of what all three athletes emphasized is how often misunderstood their commitment to basketball is. From the outside, basketball can look like a few hours in the gym and a couple of weekend games. However, the actual time it demands stretches far beyond what most students see. 

Grassick said, “It’s not just the practices we have. It’s the lifts, individual work, shooting and film that we also have on top of practice.” She added that even showing up 30 minutes early and staying 30 minutes after adds more to the schedule.

Kaban echoed that point, saying many people assume she practices for only about an hour a day and then plays games on weekends.

 Basketball also includes three one-hour lifts a week, film sessions, Friday travel to away games, which means missed classes and Saturdays fully booked with competition. “This leaves very limited time outside of class hours to stay on top of schoolwork and studying,” she said.

Wiebe pointed to another side of the workload that often goes unnoticed, which is the toll it takes on the body. “People misunderstand the amount of time [that] goes into extra eating and sleeping,” she said. “When we’re in season, I need about two more hours of sleep to feel the same as I would out of season.” 

Even then, she said, the physical strain remains constant. “You’re constantly tired because of the physical duress you put your body under every day.”

Balancing athletics with professional school becomes real very quickly. There is no long adjustment period in which things gently fall into place. Instead, the weight of both commitments tends to hit all at once.

For Kaban, that moment came in her first year of engineering while also adjusting to basketball. She remembered weeks of “8:30-4:30 class schedules, with no lunch break,” followed by rushing to practice, then racing to evening exams and finally heading to the library afterward to finish assignments due that same night. “This made me realize that not every program or student athlete has the same experience,” she said.

The turning point for Grassick came after her very first midterm in pharmacy. “The workload tripled in pharmacy from undergrad, and I had less time to study due to the demands of our team,” she said.

Wiebe said the challenge was immediate. “It was real right from the start,” she said. “I had to figure out how to eat, sleep, study and train enough to keep my body working.” Her first years in engineering were further complicated by multiple concussions that caused her to miss weeks of school. 

When she returned, she faced the task of catching up on large amounts of work while still managing symptoms. Wiebe makes it clear that student-athlete life is about time pressure, as well as about finding a way to continue through academic and personal disruptions at once.

For all three of these players, there is a constant presence of trade-offs. Sometimes basketball must take priority, while other times academics do. However, it is often the case that neither can be fully sacrificed, which means something else must give instead.

Grassick described the entire school year as “a constant balancing act of prioritizing one over the other.” During midterm season, she said, she had to sacrifice extra skill work outside of her practices to study. However, on the road for basketball, she sometimes had to sacrifice class attendance and study time instead.

Kaban said part of the balance is “understanding how to navigate the prioritization on a daily basis.” This can mean finishing work earlier in the week so game days can be devoted entirely to basketball, or rearranging lifts and practices during finals to make room for studying.

“Unless I am going to fail a class, basketball has always been the priority,” Wiebe exclaimed. Although this may be surprising to hear, the reality of being a student-athlete means that commitments are not individual anymore, and each player’s efforts affect everyone around them.

However, pressure is not always external. Kaban said she is “a very ambitious individual, with high expectations and standards for [her]self.” Grassick explained she puts a lot of pressure on herself to do well at both, though pharmacy has also taught her the importance of “cutting [her]self some slack.” Wiebe stated that most of the pressure comes from herself too, though team expectations are always present in the background.

Internal pressure matters because it shapes how these athletes respond to exhaustion and burnout. None of them romanticized the experience or reduced their experiences to simply time management. Each athlete talked about the importance of having people around them who understand what they are trying to do. 

Kaban said communication with coaches and professors has made a huge difference, especially when professors are flexible with deadlines or exam dates, and coaches build in time for studying during away trips. Grassick described the College of Pharmacy as “nothing but exceptional,” saying that its support is one reason she has been able to manage both commitments at all.

Wiebe contrasted professors who gave her extensions without hesitation with one who told her to come to class even while she was concussed, a reminder that institutional support can be inconsistent and deeply consequential.

At the same time, each player also suggested that athletics has given them something that goes beyond the court. Being an athlete taught Kaben confidence in her ability “to do hard things” and gave her resilience that carries directly into engineering. 

For Grassick, athletics gave her communication skills that translate directly into pharmacy, “especially in the pharmacy world where you need to be able to publicly speak and speak effectively to patients.” The experience as a student-athlete for Wiebe has already affected her career path, noting that she got a summer placement largely because of it.

Athletes in professional programs are surviving impossible-looking schedules while simultaneously developing the very traits universities value such as discipline, resilience, communication, accountability and the ability to perform under pressure.

Although these qualities are significant, there have been things that were given up. Grassick said she has sacrificed seeing her family and much of her social life. Originally from Prince Albert, making trips home is difficult amid the demands of school and basketball. 

Wiebe said her social life had to take “the backseat” this semester, while Kaban explained how much of her downtime and social time is spent either in the library or with her team, though she has learned to see that as part of how she combines different parts of her life.

Despite the strain, none of them described the experience with regret.

Wiebe called it “an overwhelming bundle of joy, stress and love that I wouldn’t trade for the world.” Grassick said, “It is going to be hard, but it will be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life.” 

As Kaban put it, “student-athlete life is a unique experience that tests your character, may break you down, but will be the most rewarding in the end.”

The lives these players describe are exhausting, demanding and often unsustainable looking from the outside. However, they are also meaningful because these athletes are building identities and futures inside two systems that rarely slow down for them.

From the stands, it is easy to see the game. However, all the work done around the game by players is much harder to see. 

The behind-the-scenes labour is part of their story too.

Kaban, Wiebe and Grassick make clear that student-athlete life is about far more than good scheduling. 

It is crucial to keep showing up, even when both halves of your life are asking everything from you at once. 

These phenomenal and hard-working players are proof that it is much more possible than what the typical student may believe.