Noelle Yoder came to Ashland University for two things: nursing and basketball. Less than a semester into her first year at AU, she found out she was going to have to quit one of them if she wanted to graduate on time.

“They told me that I could do nursing and basketball, and then in December (2012) I found out that that was not the case,” she said.

Yoder transferred to AU from Bowling Green between her sophomore and junior seasons after the Bowling Green coach left for Indiana. She decided to play for head coach Sue Ramsey and her Eagles team, which had just finished runner-up in the 2012 Division II NCAA tournament and was picked No. 1 preseason in 2012-13.

Not only did AU give Yoder the unique opportunity to compete for a national championship, but it also allowed her to pursue a career path that was not available to her at her previous school. Bowling Green’s nursing program is located in Toledo, which caused Yoder to major in physical therapy while competing on the basketball team.

Once she got to AU, she sat down with an adviser who laid out the options for her to enter the nursing program. She chose the advanced entry program, a bold move considering her athletic obligations but one she was assured she would be able to pull off.

She would take classes on main campus for one year before moving her studies to Mansfield, and she would graduate in the spring of 2015.

Then, in December, her plan to play out her basketball career and become a nurse came to a screeching halt. After reviewing the following year’s schedule with the basketball team psychologist, she decided the demands of being at Mansfield, taking five-and-half hour labs and 12-hour clinicals were going to interfere too much with her basketball schedule.

“After Christmas break, I just had to tell my coaches,” she said.

She finished out the season – which culminated in the team winning AU’s first-ever team national championship – and promptly retired from basketball.

Now enrolled at the Mansfield nursing campus, she says she does not regret the way things turned out.

“With the workload and the high expectations that (the nursing) program has for you, there is no way (to do both),” Yoder said. “There was no way that I would sleep more than three hours a night.”

She is not the only one who has had to make such a decision.

Erika Garn is a junior who used to compete on the cross-country and track and field teams before coming to Mansfield. A competitive runner since seventh grade, she decided it would not be feasible to continue running for AU past her sophomore year.

“I’m here for academics overall, and I wasn’t exceptional in my running so it didn’t really matter to me because I knew I could continue it on my own and just do the races I wanted to do,” she said.

Garn still runs at her own pace – which at one point during the fall semester was close to 40 miles per week – and ran her first marathon in October.

Since track and field is more of an individual sport than many others, Garn believes she may have been able to work out a special training schedule and still compete, but it would not be worth the added stress.

“It would be very challenging,” she said.

Both Yoder and Garn said they study about 20 hours per week outside of class, something they would not have time for with the rigors of a college athletics schedule.

Faced with the choice between continuing a sport they love and a career that will eventually pay for their lives, the choice was an obvious one. That does not mean it was easy.

“I miss being part of the team and competing,” Garn said. “It’s a lot different being on your own.”

Yoder was upset at first because she did not come to AU for just nursing or just basketball. She thought they would be a package deal.

“I felt like the guinea pig because they didn’t tell me that nobody else had ever done this before when I came here,” she said.

So far, only one athlete – junior wrestler Kurt Schaefer – has competed while studying at the Mansfield nursing campus. Several others have had to quit their sport.

Yoder believes both the athletic and nursing programs could do a better job of informing student-athletes how difficult it will be.

“They just all need to get on the same page because it’s kind of a mess,” she said.

As for how she is getting along now that basketball season has started without her? Yoder says she doesn’t have time to think about it. With everything she has going on with nursing, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.