No matter who you are, it’s hard to deny that our campus is brimming with active people — we have everyone from varsity athletes to just-learned-to-skate intramural hockey player coaches.
As varsity athletes ourselves — we play field hockey and squash — we are curious what it would be like to get on the elliptical in Zimmerman Fitness Center and wonder at what pace College President Phil Hanlon runs on the treadmill (does he take gym selfies?!).
On the other hand, Floren Varsity House is a mysterious cave that many of our friends cannot wrap their heads around. All I can tell you is that it’s full of lecture halls, study rooms, training rooms, offices, a weight room and the ever-mysterious football locker room. If I told you anything more, I’d have to recruit you.
For nearly three full years, we have spent hundreds of hours between the weight room, the practice field and getting our toes behind the line for conditioning sessions. When we say we have a game or a match on Saturday at noon, we really mean that we will be unavailable to interact with the rest of campus from Friday at 10 p.m. to Saturday at 5 p.m.
Varsity life, however, is not a burden. Every time our teams get together, something great is in the works. We live for the days when we get a personal record on our squat test or when something funny happens in the drill line.
We don’t always get immediate gratification, but nothing is better than our rewards for the blood, sweat, tears and laughs we put into our sports. Whether it’s a compliment from a coach or an Ivy League championship ring, we put ourselves through this because we love our sports (even if we’re internally cursing out our coaches).
We spend so much time with our teams that it is hard to focus on much else besides class and practice. We have great resources to help us find the balance we need, but with one year until graduation, we are anticipating the NARP (that’s non-athletic regular people) life with both excitement and fear.
Will we have to eat salads? How many times a day do NARPs shower — is three too many? What do people do between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.? Who will we eat dinner with every night? What does sleeping past 7 a.m. feel like? Is sitting in class while wearing jeans even comfortable? Is joining five clubs too aggressive for one term?
While some NARPs relish the glory days of high school sports when they see us walking across the Green in our newest Nike swag (which we don’t get to keep) and others think that varsity athletes are simply nuts, let us assure you that we have those same pangs of jealousy when we see NARPs going back to bed after class or hitting the town on a [insert any day of the week here].
Yet there are things that many of us take for granted — they are such integral parts of our everyday life. For instance, we have an excessive amount of chocolate milk at our fingertips, we can meet with advisors who truly have a feel for what we need help with, and we get breathtaking views of the country while we drive eight hours to Pennsylvania. Okay, maybe not that last one, but you catch our drift.
We are writing this column to give you a backstage pass into the life of an athlete that extends past the mundane complaints about practice times.
A lot gets said about varsity athletes, and this column is our point of view. We’ll describe anything from the diet of an offensive lineman to practice facilities. If you’ve ever wanted to know something about varsity lifestyles, now is your time to ask — blitz us with your questions.
Thankfully, we have another year before NARP-dom comes to fruition, and until then, we will give you a look inside the locker room.
