There have been times in my four years at Dartmouth when I’ve envied my friends at powerhouse athletic schools. For them, Saturday football was a ritual. Everybody, regardless of their knowledge of sports, would get swept up in the fervor of college football and attend the game together. Each winter, they watched their school face off in long-established college rivalries, and then follow the team through the NCAA Tournament.
The trade-off in coming to Dartmouth, though, is that we have to sacrifice that kind of sports culture and the tradition surrounding it. Yet even without an 80,000-person stadium or ESPN experts commenting on our teams, we have had no shortage of things to celebrate in Dartmouth athletics the past four years, albeit in a different way. As the Class of the 2014 prepares to leave Dartmouth, here are some of my key takeaways on the college sports world.
In my column throughout the year, I’ve advocated for a greater appreciation of individual sports. This appears time and time again to be our competitive advantage in college sports-- — our individual athletes raise eyebrows around the nation, not just representing Dartmouth, but sending a broader message that the Ivies can still be relevant in college sports without transforming their athletic departments into a business. When we look at individual sports, the gap between the powerhouse programs and the Ivies isn’t as wide as it might appear.
Abbey D’Agostino ’14 reached the Olympic trials in the 5,000-meter race, just barely missing qualifying for the London Games. That’s a huge mark of pride for any school, but particularly for one that doesn’t grant athletic scholarships. Typically the scholarship-granting Division I programs are worlds apart from the Ivies. D’Agostino’s performance reminds us that the Ivies can compete in the upper echelons of collegiate athletics.
What I’ve found most interesting about D’Agostino’s success on the track is how it has captivated people who typically have little interest in the sport. People from all parts of Dartmouth tuned into NBC to watch her race. To this day, students cite that race as one of the most uplifting Dartmouth sports moments.
Another one of our classmates, Will Geoghegan ’14, set the Ivy League record for the indoor mile, running a 3:58.04 in January. That feat put the spotlight on a track and cross country program that, while one of Dartmouth’s most accomplished, hardly gets the attention it deserves.
These accomplishments, I’ve realized, warrant more than just greater loyalty to our campus’ standout athletes. They can place Dartmouth in national debates over the future of athletics. We are at a critical juncture in the relationship between academic institutions and sports. More and more attention is being placed on the divide between athletes’ hard work and their schools’ substantial financial gain. It is a debate about institutions of higher education pursuing financial goals at the risk of depriving student-athletes of the opportunity to succeed academically.
The conventional wisdom is that, if the business-minded orientation of athletics programs were to change, it would diminish teams’ competitiveness. It would be little surprise, in fact, if proponents of this view cited the Ivies as an example of that trend: the Ancient Eight once occupied the upper echelons of college sports, but now its high academic standards and barring of athletic scholarships largely prevents the League from competing with powerhouses.
Yet that sort of thinking holds no weight — in large part because many reformists within college sports are offering up the Ivies as the model of a more balanced approach to athletics. The achievements of our individual athletes show that high levels of competition need not be sacrificed in the pursuit of a more just system for student-athletes.
While it’s easy to envy friends at schools where football and basketball are deeply ingrained in the culture, perhaps one day we will be able to take pride in our school paving the way to ensuring that athletes also take academics seriously.
