Homeschool Sports

Please welcome Mary Nunaley! She will bring her knowledge of sports and homeschooling to Homeschool 101. I'm excited to have her on board! Mary would like us to know a little about herself and her family in this first post.

I'm excited to be writing a monthly blog post for Homeschooling 101. I thought I'd start today off with a little bit about myself and my family and then over the coming months, I'll be focusing on homeschooling a high school age student who also is interested in playing college sports. Of course, I'll also be weaving in tidbits from our homeschooling day since the two go hand in hand.

I'm Mary Nunaley and I've been homeschooling for 14 years. Our homeschooling adventure began when my now 22 year old daughter came home from drama camp and made the announcement that she wanted to homeschool. I was pretty surprised and we agreed to do a trial run over the summer to see if we could actually survive each other. It worked and she graduated as a homeschooled high schooler 4 years ago. She's currently in cosmetology school and following her passion. After homeschooling her, the idea of "regular" school never even crossed my mind for my son, Amadeus.

Homeschooling the kids has always been a bit of a juggling act as I'm also a single parent and have been since my son was tiny. Luckily, in the early years I had the help of a supportive dad and sister and a wonderful loving babysitter who treated my kids as her own. As they grew older, I changed jobs from working in the Hotel Business to teaching at a community college so I would have more time and flexibility to be with them. It all has worked out well.

Our homeschooling style has always been pretty eclectic, at least until high school age - then it's gotten a little more serious as I've had to look at academic requirements, especially for my son who wants to play college tennis. My first piece of advise for anyone who has a homeschooled student considering playing college sports is to check the NCAA website for the academic course requirements. You don't want to miss anything.

A typical day in the life at our house has Amadeus working on his coursework when he wakes up around 10 a.m.- this year he's working on AP World History, World Literature, Biology, Geometry (plus finishing up some algebra). He practices tennis during the fall/winter 2-3 hours a day- when I get home from work and we make the nearly 90 minute drive to where he trains. Weekends are typically spent listening to podcasts or audio books as we travel around the south to a variety of tournaments. My daughter pitches in quite a bit when she's not a work or school and our 5 cats have a way of keeping us on our toes!

I'll be posting more next month about traveling with a junior athelete and how we incorporate educational sidetrips into tennis weekends and I'll also start looking at some of the requirements for playing college sports. If you're interested in following our tennis adventures, feel free to check out our blog.