Academics? Check. Job? Check. Three sports? This Bergen college athlete does it all
A day in the life of Melody Peralta is jam-packed with schoolwork — and sports. Lots of sports.
It usually starts around 9 a.m., sometimes at her job inside the athletic department at Bergen Community College in Paramus. Sometimes she'll tackle a bout of schoolwork before practice in the afternoon. On practice days, she hits the gym — but never on game days.
“Basically, every day, I'm doing something,” Peralta said, “from maybe 9 in the morning to 5.”
It’s a routine that repeats daily, except on Sundays, her only day off.
This may seem like the life of a typical college athlete — but Peralta is not typical.
The Elmwood Park native, named Bergen’s Woman of the Year by her conference, is a three-sport athlete. At Bergen Community College, the 18-year-old plays volleyball, softball and basketball, continuing the three sports she also played in high school. She represents a tiny percentage of the student body at Bergen who play multiple sports.
At Bergen, in a 150-student-athlete population, about 10 are multi-sport athletes, said Jorge Hernandez, the college’s managing director of athletics. Hernandez said he chose Peralta for Bergen’s highest athletic award for female athletes because she embodied what it means to be a community college athlete at the Division III level. She was one of 14 student-athletes in the Garden State Athletic Conference to be honored by the New Jersey Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.
Peralta is “the perfect person to represent our athletic department,” Hernandez said.
When Peralta isn’t at a practice or game, she helps the athletic department through her on-campus job. She works closely with one of the coaches on staff, helping uniform duty, laundry and other tasks. She also works with other teams on game days, Hernandez said.
“She would do the shot clock for us for the games — and that's not easy to do for a men's basketball game,” Hernandez said. “So, she would play basketball. Finish up. Take a shower. Come up and help us with the shot clock as a student worker, and she did wonderfully there.”
She may do that after hour-long practices each week. Some days, if her seasons overlap, she may have two practices a day. That could happen when volleyball is ending in the fall and basketball is starting, Hernandez said.
Essentially, Peralta has no offseason. That wasn’t always the plan.
“I wasn't planning on doing three sports,” Peralta said. “I wanted to maybe focus more on my schoolwork during the volleyball season and basketball season. I was only going to do softball — but I guess I missed it.”
It was the team atmosphere that drew her back, Peralta said. She missed having teammates and coaches, and the bonds that developed throughout the season. It isn’t always easy, she said, to battle through knee pain and other physical ailments. But she pushes through.
Juggling three sports helps keep her grades up, Peralta said. The discipline she learns on the courts and field extend to her everyday life. That’s important as she looks ahead to life after Bergen, with her immediate goal of attending Rutgers in New Brunswick to continue her education. There she hopes to continue playing sports at any capacity.
Passion sparked early
Peralta has played sports for as long as she can remember.
She began at the recreational level with basketball, and later discovered her love for baseball. She credits her father — a diehard Mets fan in a Yankees family — for sparking her passion for the sport.
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“He really got me into baseball when I was little,” she said. “Now I’m just a really huge Mets fans.”
Peralta didn’t have many opportunities to play baseball growing up, so she stuck with softball in high school, and now in college. But she envisions a future with baseball in it, hopefully working for her and her fathers’ beloved New York Mets in their front office.
Until then, she’s happy where she is. Hernandez said, Peralta is an important role model for others like her at Bergen and other community colleges, where there has been a decline of female athletic participation.
"There's a lot of great things that come along with being a student athlete," Hernandez said. It's important "to continue to grow our women’s sports — because they have been at a decline in all our county schools.
"So Melody is a great representative as someone who loves sports as a female, and continues to do it and does it well," he said.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: This Bergen college athlete juggles academics, job and 3 sports
