CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Time is precious for Houston Summers, a 27-year-old junior at North Carolina, and not just because he is majoring in psychology, with two minors, in the hopes of attending medical school. Summers, a former professional baseball player, is now a walk-on javelin thrower on the track team, and he is also trying to become the student body president.

To say Summers is busy is an understatement, said R. J. Alowonle, a junior hurdler and Summers’s roommate.

“Every morning when we wake up, one of the first things I ask him is: ‘Hey, man, what do you have to do today? What are your meetings?’ ” Alowonle said. “It’d be hectic just to be running for student body president alone. And having track on top of that.”

He added, “Sometimes I wonder how he does it.”

The election will be decided Tuesday in a runoff between Summers and another candidate. His platform’s main themes are unity and athletic reform. And at a time when the university’s reputation has taken a blow — the Wainstein Report, published in 2014, outlined the severe scope of academic impropriety that occurred at North Carolina from 1993 to 2011, primarily among student-athletes — an athlete as the face of the student body would be, at the least, intriguing.