We take athletics seriously at Dartmouth. How seriously? Enough to devote our resources to sustain 32 varsity teams. Enough to write a 12-page Mirror issue on them. And for some of us who don't play on a Division-I team, we take Dartmouth sports seriously enough to think that we are almost on a varsity team or multiple teams ourselves.
"Most of my best friends are on sports teams," Jack Coster '13 said. "I'm a diehard sports fan. I do everything but compete."
In fact, we often can't quite draw the line between who is the athlete and who just thinks they're the athlete.
"A lot of people assume I'm on the basketball team because I spend a lot of time with the girls and I'm really tall," Katie Lunt '15 said. "I just kind of go with it."
For many former high school varsity athletes who don't play a sport in college, however, the idea of being on a sports team here is not a far stretch.
"That's one of the misnomers a lot of kids that you could classify that way can't play at D-I level, but that doesn't mean they can't play sports," Coster said. "I played three sports in high school and gravitated toward people with the same interests. They're easy to get along with."
Coster said that although he gets "ripped on" a lot for being friends with mostly athletes, these friendships are not all based on sports.
"I go to watch their matches, and they come to watch my theater productions," he said. "Everyone is really supportive of everyone, whatever you do."
Of course, it's legitimate to question how it's even possible for people who don't spend all their time training with a team get to know its members so well. (Read: So you mean you're not intimidated by the table in FoCo filled with football players all wearing their fancy Dartmouth jackets with three plates of food in front of them?)
"A lot of kids are intimidated by group mentality, but I'm not," Teddy Henderson '15 said. "I don't see any problem in walking up to a large group of people and forcing your way into it. You miss out on a lot if you don't do that."
For the most part, though, these friendships are not forced. They start the way most relationships here do.
"Some of my best friends I met through my freshman floor," Coster said. "You meet some of these people who you otherwise wouldn't."
Many of these relationships also start in classes, not on the field.
"I make them as friends first in class, and then I just find out they're on a team," Henderson said.
Still, there are times when friends need to be made for more, um, urgent purposes.
"At the beginning of the year, the sober dance party in Occom [Commons] sucked," Henderson said. "So I went to these huge looking guys thinking they'd be on the football team and have an in' at a frat, and they did."
Then again, as a non-athlete in these types of situations, you have to be OK with the fact that at least some part of that frat or dining hall table will have no idea why you're hanging with them.
"It's always kind of awkward when there are people you don't know who are actually part of the team," Lunt said. "You're like, Oh hi, everyone knows me, except I'm that weird girl who doesn't play the sport.'"
Naturally, this sometimes means the team outsider wants to feel like he or she is part of the team minus the practice, of course.
"I'm glad that I don't play basketball in that I don't have the time commitment," Lunt said. "But I'm also always like, I wish I could go to basketball tails and was part of the group for real.'"
In these relationships, the typical student dynamics are a little different when athletes are in season.
"It's almost like they're on an off-term," Coster said. "You might see them in a class or in passing, but you're not really spending time with them otherwise."
This is often where the multiple-sport associations come in handy.
"My main crew is the football team, but I have friends everywhere," Henderson said. "I'll hang out with the team that doesn't have practice."
Notice my conscious decision to refrain from using the term NARP throughout this whole article. (Clarification: "Non-athletic regular person." Is that really the best thing we could come up with?)
The truth is that just because some of us (or actually, the majority of us) don't play a D-I sport doesn't mean we're not athletic, or that we don't love sports or, for some of us, that we can't hang out with the athletes all the time as if we were on the team. Athletic associations aren't the end-all, be-all at this school, after all.
