Should I quit my dance club?
I'm a grade 12 student that is a part of my school's dance team. We have a lot of members so only a select few get to compete to represent our school, and I am one of them. Last year, most of our members are in grade 12 and only three of us were in grade 11, meaning that only three of us would be remaining. Which makes me extremely guilty if I ever do decide to quit. Since our coach said that he will be relaying on us three. I would not only be disappointing our coach, but also my fellow members who I have been close to. I would also be leaving my juniors a not so good message of quitting.
We won our competition within the province last year, but unfortunately lost our municipal competition. Our coach and us want to win municipal this year so we will be working hard and our choreo will be difficult and technical.
I have been considering qutting since grade 11 because I couldn't balance dancing and schoolwork at the same time. Our class starts at 6am and ends around 12pm. But our practice starts at 5pm and ends at 8pm. I can't just go home after school and rest first before practice because I live far away and it would just be inefficient in terms of time and money. I would arrive home very tired and have little energy to do my homework. I have to note that this schedule is only during when we have to prepare for competitions (which can take around 2 months), and we don't practice everyday. But after the competitions, we have lots of events at school in which we need to prepare for it. We practice after school but we don't end up too late. But, there have been instances where an event was important that we had to be pulled out of class just to practice. This definitely affected my grades and my understanding of some of our lessons even if it was little.
Anyway, on top of basically living at school, we have a lot of homework and projects to do. We had research (I was the leader of our research group so I had extra work, but I also had extra points though), and lots of art and drama projects even if I wasn't taking art classes. And generally the projects they give out tends to relay on teamwork and was time consuming, meaning that we also had to meet up outside of school just to do the work. But the thing is, due to my lack of luck (and maybe lack of leadership...) I attracted groupmates who weren't motivated to do the work and always expected me to do it for them. I have to note that I didn't pick those leadership roles, they just assumed that I would be one because they deemed that I was smart I guess?
You get the picture. School was beating me up to a pulp. It was even a lot more tiring during exam week. I was running on little to no sleep which hindered my performance. I was so sleepy during class and even during the exam.
The only reason I didn't quit last year was because a close senior of mine convinced me not to. She was really supportive, and since the end of school year was nearing I just decided to stick it out.
Now that I am a grade 12 student, things will get a lot more tiring. Not only I have to keep up with the more difficult workload, I will also have to work on my university and scholarship applications. I will also have to study in my barely existing free time for the entrance exams. Note that since we are now in grade 12 our schedule changed from '6am to 12pm' to '12pm to 5pm', this means that right after class we have practice (only during competition months), so I don't have to wait a long time at school anymore.
Aside from those things, the dance club does have its benefits. I live a pretty sedentary life, so dancing is my form of exercising. It also looks good on my application, especially since I compete and have won (hopefully more in the future). It's also nice that we are graded for being a part of a club. When we win competitions, we get extremely high grades for it. But we do get higher grades than those who are not a part of any extracurricular clubs.
When I think of the cons it makes me want to quit so badly, but when I think of the pros it makes me want to stay and tough it out. I desperately need some advice. Should I just work on my time management skills or just quit since I don't plan on dancing at college anyway? Any advice will be appreciated, thanks.