Editor's Note: Through the Looking Glass is The Mirror's newest feature. We welcome submissions from all members of the community both past and present who wish to write about defining experiences, moments or relationships during their time at Dartmouth. Please submit articles of 800-1,000 words to the.dartmouth@dartmouth.edu.
At Dartmouth, student-athletes like myself are forced to transcend the hyphen dividing these two very different responsibilities and be both a teammate as well as part of the larger Dartmouth community. However, the cultural sphere surrounding athletics and football often conflicts with the values and rhetoric of Dartmouth outside of the playing field.
Ivy League football players find themselves in inherently conflicted programs. The remnants of previous tradition and prestige leaves the League scholarship-less, differentiating it from all other Division I conferences and allowing teams to lure recruits only with the promise of a great education that is not contingent on their continued participation in the sport. With four of the eight schools having fired their head coach in the last three years, the coaches leading these uncompensated players are held to high competitive standards. In addition, their significant salaries are at stake with compensation packages in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The dichotomy between players incentivized only with the satisfaction of winning and coaches with significant financial motivations and horrible job security creates a potentially contentious environment.
Ivy league football also struggles with its own identity, as the game deals with ghosts of it former glory and an uncertain future. I meet older crowds of alumni that still recall the Ivy's national football prominence as the current league retains a loyal following but pushes itself further into a self-imposed isolation. Many of my teammates had higher attendance at high school football games but spend countless more hours in college training and practicing for the opportunity to get on the field. The league fights to maintain nostalgia and purity and presents a truly unique college football experience at the expense of its own relevance.
As I become more indoctrinated in the College's idealized liberal arts culture, I find it becomes increasingly difficult to fit the basic philosophy of football into the ethos of the larger community. At the core of the sport is a sense of brutality and violence in which scandals involving "bounty hunter" programs are unsurprising. Meanwhile, I listen to Dartmouth's current and past presidents describe the "sweetness" of the school and tell us to use liberal arts for the "liberation from the meanness and meagerness of mere existence." The contrast becomes painfully apparent as I work through neuroscience classes detailing the complexity and fragility of the brain while simultaneously watching close teammates and friends forced to medically retire from the sport due to lingering neurological symptoms from concussions. While the curriculum aims to instill me with logical, critical thought, we play a sport where hustle, toughness and a touch of rage drive us to repeatedly throw ourselves into each other. My public economics professor might call this a "failure to internalize future risk," but the machismo of the sport's culture blinds all consideration of health consequences. Football alumni that return to the College with crooked fingers and a small hitch in their gait almost always affirm our decisions and assert that they wouldn't give up a moment of their time on the field for anything.
The recent campus controversy surrounding building bonds through shared hardship further differentiates football from the rest of Dartmouth. In the context of fraternities, any type of emotional or physical discomfort is publicly shunned and possibly illegal. However, putting teams into both psychologically and physically challenging situations is a hallmark of football's "mental toughness training" that is not only acceptable but celebrated and successful in the context of athletics. The legend of famous college football coach Bear Bryant's hellish workouts in the oppressive Texas desert that forced players to push beyond their mental and physical boundaries or quit the team still exists in less extreme forms in programs across the country. While a fraternity cannot "punish" a member for being unaccountable with a clear conscience, football teams not only use punishment but also manufacture conflict in order to test the team's resolve. When my teammates and I were instructed to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to bear-crawl around the field and spend hours collecting thousands of scattered q-tips it was acceptable, albeit unpleasant, as punishment for another teammate's tardiness. A similar task would provoke outrage if used by professors or "pledge masters" to punish a late paper or a missed clean-up. The discipline is effective: We generally arrive on time, and we fear disappointing their teammates and ultimately build the team accountability necessary to win. However, the role of physical stress and punishment in building teams becomes peculiar when juxtaposed with the "sweetness" of the Dartmouth community.
The sport of football has changed with the world around it, but its core culture has generally withstood the challenges of time. No rules can be changed to alter the toughness, both physical and mental, and unity that the best teams show. The team has allowed me to develop close friends and a sense of community that would not have been possible without a few sub-freezing morning workouts running stadiums and toting telephone poles. However, when I leave the confines of Memorial Field and journey onto campus, I also bring along a culture that doesn't fit perfectly into the curriculum.
In many ways, the conflict between football and the College represents the ultimate struggle between my mind and heart. As a programmed liberal arts student, I have questioned the merits and critically considered the purpose of many aspects of football culture that sometimes defy pure logic. However, the real appeal and justification for the sport resonates with me on a much more visceral level that I will leave to the poets to articulate. You will rarely meet a current player that professes to always enjoy the sport, but there are even fewer that would say they regret their time on Memorial Field.
