It's natural to hang around those we feel most comfortable with and to conveniently befriend those we spend the most time with. But sometimes it seems that our campus athletes take such insular friendship to an extreme.
Due to their rigorous practice and game schedules, many student-athletes interviewed by The Mirror said it was perceptibly harder to make friends outside of their own teams.
"I felt like freshman year I hung out solely with basketball players," Matt LaBove '13, a member of the men's basketball team, said. "I didn't get to branch out and meet more people."
Even freshmen are able to sense the camaraderie and potential segregation that comes from being a part of a varsity sport here at Dartmouth.
"A lot of the teams here are close knit and if you have such a close-knit team, you don't really feel the need to branch out," varsity swimmer Rebecca Butler '15 said.
That fact that teams traditionally eat meals together after practices and before games makes it easier for players to fall into the routine of insularity before their freshman peers ever arrive on campus.
"We started eating meals as a team even before I got here, which made adjusting to college a lot easier," men's squash captain Brian O'Toole '12 said.
What effect does this culture of isolation have on the already difficult transition process of so many freshmen?
"So much of freshman year is finding what you want to be in college but being on a team makes some of those choices for you," said O'Toole. "You come into college with an identity already."
LaBove agreed, expressing the difficulty for athletes to form meaningful friends outside their teams, without the free time enjoyed by other students.
"You could easily fall into the flow of basketball," LaBove said. "I had to make a conscious choice to have a wider network of friends my sophomore year."
The mix of athletes and non-athletes in Greek houses does provide a chance to branch out to their "nonner" peers yet whether athletes capitalize on the opportunity is another question entirely. The already insular tendencies of teams are often cemented by the pattern of fraternities accepting specific teams' athletes into their ranks, athletes said. The stereotypes are apparent even to freshmen.
"For me, coming in as a freshman because of squash, a lot of my choices were set in some direction already," O'Toole said. "Because all the captains of the squash team were in AD, I was going to go to AD."
Yet do non-athletes feel threatened by this routine?
"It is a little intimidating when you first meet your roommate and they already have a lot of friends on their team," Max Gottschall '15, whose roommate is on the squash team, said.
Not everyone, however, believes athletes are intentionally cliquey.
"If you're spending that much time with people on you're team, you're going to be friends with them," varsity swimmer Erin Henn '14 said. "I don't think it's isolation as much as convenience."
She also said that the phenomenon of athlete insularity is potentially overblown because of the visibility of athletes on campus.
"Since the athletes are all wearing their uniforms, when they hang out together they stand out more," Henn said.
