This weekend, I was especially proud to be a Dartmouth student. On Friday night, I showed up just after the first whistle of the Dartmouth-Haiti men's soccer game to find the student section already overflowing. As the game went on, more and more students filed into the bleachers, until even the standing room options filled up.
Kind of shocking, because here at Dartmouth we thrive on fashionable lateness. We're late for lunch, late for tails and always sneaking in for the last call for Collis pasta. When my roommate (and fellow D sports writer) covered the hockey games last year, we'd always arrive awkwardly early and notice that the student section would be mostly empty until the second period.
But Dartmouth students were excited for this soccer game. They made a valiant effort to trek down to Burnham Field, hanging out in the cold for a couple of hours. And the surprises kept coming while the crowd could have been apathetic and just around for the facetime, it wasn't like that at all. It's likely that not every student at the game was a diehard soccer fan, but everyone in the stands seemed passionate about the goings-on down on the field.
Punctual and interested, the crowd on Friday was everything a crowd should be. What pushed me to the point of pride, however that deep-seeded, "I'm-so-lucky-I-go-here" feeling was how the fans showed interest in the match. Instead of the silly epithets that are often hurled at Harvard players, our fans let loose with applause for both teams.
What I'm saying is not that our fans had ambiguous loyalties, but that for once they acted like mature adults. College fan behavior, in general, tends to be relatively aggressive and, frankly, unoriginal. (It's SO funny when we point out that Princeton is a safety school, but did you know that we probably weren't the first to use that jeer?)
Our fans got a particularly bad rap after one infamous squash match against the Crimson in Fall 2009. At the match, I found myself vacillating between laughing and cringing, though I heard only a couple of the many offensive taunts reported by the Valley News. But we're not as cruel or as insensitive as the ensuing media storm suggested not even close.
On Friday, we were extraordinary. We cheered for positives louder than we cheered for negatives. We noticed the strengths of each team our advantage in size, their incredible quickness. We picked up on Dartmouth's many long kicks and headers in comparison to Haiti's tendency to work the ball up from the backfield. As we reveled in "springtime," we saw the gloves on the hands of every Haitian player, and many Dartmouth players' too, and maybe we even thought that the officiating was unbalanced. But mostly, we were positive and just happy to be there.
The good behavior didn't spring from any condescending sympathy for our opponents although the Haitian team may be ranked 99th among the teams of the 202 world FIFA nations, they still represent a soccer-loving country, and we're just a college on a hill. I believe, rather, that Dartmouth's fans actually understood the friendly nature of the match, which was part of the Haitian team's benefit tour throughout the Northeast and raised funds for Partners in Health's relief efforts in Haiti.
The Haiti game was the kind that families probably were able to enjoy just as much as students. The kind of event that College President Jim Yong Kim could be proud of both as our president and as a founder of Partners in Health. This was the kind of soccer match that was actually much more a symbol of Dartmouth's place in the world.
With Friday's match a 2-1 loss for the Big Green we burst the omnipresent Dartmouth bubble, even if it will come back. Alongside a tiny girl wrapped in Haiti's flag I spotted in the bleachers, near a local family with signs in English and French cheering on both teams, we loved the game for itself.
