Junior Sara Collins stares at her bed.

It’s only three feet away — deceivingly close. But willpower is a strong part of her and she fights the temptation to call it a night. She allows herself to tear her eyes away from her books long enough to glance at the clock. It’s 1:30 a.m.

Sara is a full-time club soccer player and varsity cross country runner, and she still has to keep up with her school work. For her, getting over five hours of sleep at night is a commodity.

“I’ve told her before: you can be status quo if you want to be, but if you want to be excellent at something then it’s going to take some sacrifice,” her mother Linda Collins said. “So far I think she wants to.”

Every day, Sara drags her way through the first four hours of school, snagging a bite to eat from the cafeteria if time allows before rushing off to I-Media CAPS. Following CAPS, she darts off to practice number one — Sara often arrives at school well after the dismissal bell rings, grabbing a protein drink from her mom’s classroom. She races up the stairs, arriving out of breath before the rest of the cross country team has even begun.

Her day isn’t even halfway over yet. The workout — ranging anywhere from a ‘leisurely’ 8-mile run to a long hill workout in 90 degree humidity — doesn’t end until 5:30 p.m. From there, Sara only has a half hour to change and eat before she has to leave for soccer practice, 90 minutes of drills, scrimmaging, and laps or sprints. Arriving home around 9 p.m., it’s straight to the books for the next three to four hours. She is allowed even less sleep on Tuesday nights, where she is reluctantly forced to set her alarm for 5 a.m. in order to swim the next morning for a cross country recovery day.

“I put a lot of pressure on myself — I always want everything to be perfect,” Sara said. “I want to show the best of my abilities and I want people to see me for how hard I work. I just have to push through everything and teach myself how to deal with both sports.”

Sara’s situation is not at all unique. Although having many opportunities available is an advantage to attending a well-rounded high school, it also makes it easy for students to commit to more than they can handle.

Sophomore Brandon Spitler swims at school in the winter and sprints during track in the spring. He is also a part of the Kansas City Blazers swim team, a high performance club team of which Olympic gold medalist Shannon Vreeland (among other top-notch swimmers) were once part of.

“Brandon is a kid who needs to be pushed,” Brandon’s mother Katherine Spitler said. “If he’s not pushed and challenged he’s going to be bored and he’s not going to do his best. He is ridiculously overly competitive in all arenas, which can be a bit of a weakness. It gets in his head and it can be detrimental. But I also think it can be a great strength because it forces him to work harder than I think he would.”

Brandon’s bedroom walls are covered with accomplishments: over 36 medals on the track wall alone, mirroring the varsity swim plaque and two school records (among several other awards) he earned as a freshman. Stacks of Splash magazine are piled on his dresser and Usain Bolt  workouts hang in his closet. He certainly takes after his father, Scott Spitler, who played baseball as well as various other sports through high school and college.

“We try to emphasize doing the best you can, but to me it’s important to be competitive and to leave it all on the field knowing that you didn’t hold anything back,” Scott said. “He puts a pretty good amount of that pressure on himself too.”

The challenge lies in the fact that the students don’t just want to participate in many different activities, but they want to excel in everything that they do.

“I live by everything affects everything,” Brandon said. “Swim affects track, track affects school, school affects family, family affects church . . . so I need to start doing better in everything.”

Achieving this perfection has proven to be difficult. The school year has just begun, and already Brandon has been forced to give up cross country and his busy schedule has “affected his grades in a negative way.” But Brandon is determined to not only do everything, but to also be the best at what he does.

“It’s not necessarily a tangible goal,” he said. “But I think I can make it one.”