Dartmouth students love labels. At a school where anonymity isn't easily maintained, many students simply memorize facts about their peers so they can more easily be put into context on campus. One of the most commonly placed of these labels is that of an athlete. It's an inherent part of our campus culture: The moment you hear someone is on a varsity team, you often create a concept of who they are and pigeonhole them. For many Dartmouth athletes, however, identifying them solely as a player on a team incorrectly implies that their passions exist only on the field.
David Rufful '12 just completed his Dartmouth basketball career after being team captain his senior year. While he held an important role on a varsity team for four years and felt "pretty passionately about it," his extracurricular commitments outside of basketball demonstrate a variety of interests in other areas, too.
Rufful co-founded the Young Conservatives a conservative activist group at Dartmouth that has been featured on several national television programs during his freshman year. He has also served as editor-in-chief of the conservative campus publication The Dartmouth Review and been a research fellow in the government department. But in spite of his desire to be involved in other activities while in college, the demanding commitment of basketball made it a complicated balancing act.
"Coaches really stress that they want you to be able to do a lot of things," Rufful said. "But it's not always necessarily true that you'll be able to do that because it's very difficult to compete at the highest level of athletics if you're doing a variety of other things."
When prioritizing his commitments, putting another extracurricular before basketball was never really an option.
"I definitely identify as a student first, then as an athlete just because it's mandatory in the sense that Young Conservatives is something I did on my own," Rufful said.
Because of the amount of time Rufful had to dedicate to his sport, he said he actively pushed himself to hang out with people other than his teammates.
"You're with basketball a lot, so it's good to have friends who aren't," he said. "It's good to live with people who aren't on the team. A lot of my friends come from other aspects of campus."
Alexi Pappas '12 is also involved in an extracurricular activity on campus that is very separate from her role as captain of the cross country and track teams the Dog Day Players, an improvisational comedy group.
"That's like the other big thing in my life," she said. "They're two very different but equally important things to me."
While Pappas had always been planning on running in college, being injured during her freshman fall forced her to pursue a non-athletic activity.
"My cross country friends were my only friends at the time, and I was really sad when I had to miss my first meet," she recalled. "I was sitting in my room by myself and kept getting all of these emails saying to come hang out [with the Dog Day Players], so I decided to go."
While Pappas acknowledges that running is her first priority in terms of extracurricular activities because it influences her entire lifestyle, she said she cannot clearly identify the activity athletic or comedic to which she relates more, she said.
"I think they complement each other," she said. "I wouldn't be one without the other. Having a sense of humor in athletics is important because things don't always go your way. There's also definitely an element of improv in running sometimes, you have to just go with it and be flexible."
For Michael Odokara-Okigbo '12, who is a member of both the Dartmouth Aires and the heavyweight crew team, his two non-academic passions are similarly inseparable.
"On campus, I see myself as just having different hats," he said. "I guess I consider myself as a singing athlete. I love the drive, the passion, the work ethic and the successes of [both]. They intertwine a lot, but they're different. I don't consider myself either or."
Unlike most varsity athletes, Odokara-Okigbo didn't know that he was going to pursue athletics in college, choosing to walk onto the team his freshman year with no prior rowing experience.
Singing, however, was something for which he had developed a passion long before coming to Dartmouth, as well as something that he plans to continue after graduation Odokara-Okigbo said he will move to Los Angeles to pursue music professionally.
While in college, Odokara-Okigbo has not let either side of his passions inhibit the other, he said.
"There's definitely compromises, but as long as you work really hard to fulfill your commitments, it's definitely doable to succeed in both sports and the arts at Dartmouth," he said.
Adam Rice '12 has also been able to balance his athletic commitment to the soccer team with a slightly different passion: education.
While at Dartmouth, Rice pursued this interest through his leadership in Summer Enrichment at Dartmouth, a program directed at helping high school students from under-resourced backgrounds. He is also the director of Athletes United, which provides a free sports program coached by Dartmouth athletes to children in the Upper Valley.
After graduation, Rice plans to teach kindergarten at a brand new elementary school in New Jersey through Teach for America. Like his peers, Rice said he does not feel that identifying athletes solely by their sport does justice to what it means to be a Dartmouth student.
"Being a student-athlete has been a major part of my Dartmouth experience and is something I'm extraordinarily proud of," he said. "But it's been one of a handful of tremendous experiences. I've gained so much and learned so much on the field and off the field with my teammates, but I've also learned so much outside of athletics."
When you consider the fact that playing a varsity sport in college is a lot like having a job on top of being a student, it's difficult to comprehend how these individuals have figured out how to do it all, and then some. The fact of the matter is that students whose passions, talents and interests have both depth and breadth cannot be easily categorized based solely on their relationship to a team.
So next time you meet someone who happens to play a sport, drop the preconceived notions. You never know that football player in your math class could be a closet poet. People at Dartmouth are generally pretty interesting people, and when given the chance, they will very often surprise you.
