Tellis gives a rundown of her freshman year at Georgia State University
ATLANTA (BVM) — Wondering if you will be recruited and looking for schools to spend the next four years of your life in are already stressful situations for senior high school athletes, but for athletes like Camarii Tellis, this process has been especially hard.
As we all know, COVID-19 had an immense impact on the world, but it added stress and took away memories from the high school class of 2020.
With prom and many senior activities unable to occur because of school closings, track athletes were left without an entire running season, which is especially important for seniors who are trying to increase their performances to attract recruiters.
Tellis is one of these athletes who was struggling to sign with a college. Like most college athletes, she started running young with parks and recreation at 11-years-old. This hobby turned into a lifestyle as she continued running throughout middle and high school.
She grew close to her teammates in high school at Rufus King, even claiming that her team was full of great athletes.
“We were like sisters and I miss them so much,” Tellis said. “We were really good and we won state a lot…we were honestly like the best group of athletes that school had at one time.”
Transitioning into the recruiting process, however, was not so pleasant for Tellis. Instead of being recruited by schools, she had to reach out to coaches and colleges herself.
“It’s hard being the person trying to contact the school versus the school contacting you,” said Tellis.
For some athletes, the recruiting process is a breeze with multiple coaches coming to you offering various amounts of money and showing that they really want you on the team. For other athletes, the process can be taxing; you have to reach out to coaches and keep in contact, sometimes having to send multiple messages back-to-back without responses in order to stay on their radar. Tellis explains her experience with coaches during recruiting as being the latter.
Tellis said, “Sometimes the coaches would not respond and I had to double text multiple times. I felt as if I wasn’t really wanted even though I was offered money.”
Sometimes Tellis never got responses from college coaches and had to get her high school coach to reach out to them.
Tellis was finally able to secure a school that she liked. She decided to sign with Georgia State University because she liked the thrill of living in Atlanta, GSU has a black student majority, the school had her major, and after talking with student-athletes about the school, she felt it would be a good fit. She was even offered a full ride, then tragedy struck.
Tellis was in the process of receiving her National Letter of Intent when COVID-19 flipped the world upside down. Her full ride scholarship had to be reduced to nearly nothing due to university-wide COVID-19 related budget cuts.
Having already committed to Georgia State University and turning down other schools, Tellis had no choice but to stick with Georgia State, despite the lowered scholarship that she would receive. Because of this, Tellis could not live on campus like she planned to; the prices of the dorms that the athletes on her team stayed in were too expensive.
“I was not invited to a lot of things [social activities] because I was not as close to people as I could’ve been if I was on campus,” Tellis said.
Things did not improve much once Tellis was on the team, but after she showed her talent, things started to change.
“It felt as if I had to prove myself to the coach before being treated normally,” Tellis said.
It took a lot of adjusting for Tellis to transfer from high school to college. She mentioned being surprised about the amount of time that has to be contributed to track at the college Division I level.
Tellis said, “I see that college sports is like a part-time job and you barely have any time to do anything else in your life. I’m used to having a part-time job while training, but I can’t have a job in season.”
Not only was Tellis not able to have a job, but she was not able to make as many friends as she’d hoped to, but this can possibly be attributed to the all-online nature of the classes the University offered.
“Social life was so boring,” Tellis said. “I did not make any friends besides the people on my team.”
There were some positives to Tellis’ freshman year, however. She achieved a 4.0 GPA in both semesters of her first year, gaining a spot on the President’s Honor Roll List. She also is excited about all the film industry opportunities that she has in Atlanta. She even made it through the year COVID-19 free despite travelling often for competitions. Tellis had multiple personal records in the long jump, 100-meter dash, and 200-meter dash, even scoring a point for the team at the Outdoor Conference Championships in the long jump.
Overall, she is happy with the decision that she made to attend Georgia State University and to run for the school; she even runs a Youtube channel describing her experiences throughout the year. Tellis urges others who are looking to be recruited to keep their options open and to make sure that they research multiple schools before making their final decision.
“I am happy with my decision to come here because of the people I met but I also wish I would have researched more schools before making a decision,” said Tellis.
