Columbia Sports Are #OnlyHere — Why Aren’t We?
Columbia Sports Are #OnlyHere — Why Aren’t We?
Despite the distractions of a New York City lifestyle, Columbia students have a lot to gain by supporting our teams.
In August, 1,500 starry-eyed first-years entered campus eager to begin their college experience. They’ve heard stories about this. They’ve dreamed of parties, football games, school pride, and campus traditions. At Columbia, however, we like to say that our college experience is unique—being in New York City makes us as a community and institution different from traditional campuses, even among the Ivy League.
That uniqueness extends to our lack of school spirit. We all enter eager to represent Columbia loud and proud, yet we seem to quickly turn into pessimists within a semester or two, with few good words to say about our dining halls, campus culture, and administration.
Nowhere is our dismal school spirit and perpetual pessimism more apparent than our student body’s collective disinterest in Columbia sports. Our Homecoming celebration pales in comparison to the jubilant scenes at many state schools. In 2011, the Columbia University Band Alumni Association was barred from performing at athletic events when they changed the lyrics of “Roar, Lion, Roar”, to “We always lose, lose, lose/sometimes by a lot, sometimes by a little.”
But the biggest difference is not the size of our student body. It’s that students at other schools feel genuine excitement about the day, and care deeply about whether their team wins or loses.
Even football, by all standards a marquee sporting event, struggles to fill seats compared to Ivy League peers. Last year’s Homecoming against Penn drew in a crowd of 8,032, filing less than half of Kraft Field’s capacity of 17,000. Compare this to Harvard’s homecoming game against Dartmouth, which drew in crowds of 22,515, or (perhaps an unfair comparison), Harvard vs. Yale, which drew in crowds of 51,127. Our enthusiasm pales in comparison.
In his 1945 essay “The Sporting Spirit,” George Orwell portrays sports fandom as a microcosm of nationalism and a reflection of our inherent “us versus them” mentality. We identify with teams that become an extension of ourselves and our ego. It’s why national football (soccer) becomes so heated, as the nation risks “losing face” in the wake of defeat.
In Columbia students’ perpetual pessimism, we view this “us versus them” dynamic as beneath us. Because we already don’t like Columbia, it’s as if we can’t despise Harvard or view ourselves as better than Cornell. We do this because we’ve already abandoned school spirit—there’s no “us” in the “us versus them.”
But for thousands of Columbia undergraduates, including myself, our lack of collective school spirit feels like a void in our college experience. Across America, the most common and appropriate outlet for school spirit is school sports, yet we have maintained an attitude of indifference towards our sports programs, choosing to prioritize other pastimes. Some cite the travel time to Baker Athletics Complex, but realistically we’ve all ridden the subway for far longer for far more superficial purposes. Even sports held on the Morningside campus, such as basketball, have generally dismal attendance.
This does not have to be our reality. An atmosphere of excitement around teams representing Columbia would encourage us to celebrate our school in the fiery way Orwell describes. Our campus needs spirit right now, not just so that we can throw fun parties and tailgates—but because we need to heal.
Each team consists of fellow students, and reveling in Columbia’s successes and wallowing in its defeats connects us all as a school and strengthens our community. Students may be on different teams when it comes to our politics, beliefs, and where we come from, but uniting behind our teams is a way to come together independent of those differences, and celebrate our shared identity as Columbia students.
And, it’s not like there isn’t anything in Columbia sports to be excited about. Women’s basketball is seeking to build upon last year’s terrific performance, and fencing will continue being one of the best programs in the country (with or without our viewership). And recently, seven Columbia Lions represented their nation at the Paris Olympics. Jackie Dubrovich CC’16, a fencer (who would’ve guessed), even brought home the United States’ first ever gold medal in the sport.
We’ll never draw the crowds of an Alabama football game, but that won’t matter to a Yale team coming to New York City met by a loud sea of Pantone 292. Our history includes some epic scenes of school pride: Take, for example, massive crowds gathering on Broadway and the theft of a goal post after our football team broke a 44-game losing streak in 1988. Such a scene was not only created by students but encouraged by the University; back on campus, administrators served pizza and soft drinks at a large on-campus celebration. Once upon a time, even in the face of a historically bad run, we had pride and excitement about Columbia.
Our indifference to Columbia sports may seem insignificant compared to other issues on campus, but it reflects a serious disengagement with the community we live in. The start of the school year brings new seasons in every sport and with them, the opportunity to reignite some of our school spirit and forge a more united campus.
Mr. Tesoro is a senior studying political Science and history at Columbia College and a staff writer for Sundial. He is a former sports reporter for the Columbia Daily Spectator.