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"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

SPORTING



UD lays it on thick when it comes to the corruption of bigtime university sports. Here’s the other side of the story, described in a beautifully written article by Adam Cooper, a Tufts student.




THE WINNING EPHECT
Adam Cooper
November 11, 2004




"The best program around isn't the New England Patriots. It isn't U. Conn's women's basketball team. Nope, the best program around these days wears Purple.

That's right, over in the boonies, the Williams Ephs have established themselves as the best in Div. III. And it's not just one team. It's all of them. Our NESCAC rival recently won the Director's Cup, given to the best Div. III collegiate athletic program, for the sixth straight time. Sports Illustrated concurred.

But Sunday may have taken the cake. Williams grabbed NESCAC championships in volleyball, men's and women's soccer, and field hockey. For both the volleyball and men's soccer teams, it was the fourth straight league title. Remember, this school has fewer than 2,000 students. Surely there must be something going on here. Money under the table? Recruiting visits to the award-winning Williamstown strip clubs? Booster-funded dinners at Red Lobster?




I decided to use my ace investigative reporting skills to get to the bottom of this. But I don't have a car. Luckily, I do have a phone. Unfortunately, I couldn't trick Williams Athletic Director Dick Quinn into admitting to improprieties or scandal.

Instead, Quinn cited the coaches, kids, facilities, close-knit atmosphere, and tradition. 'I'm a big believer in tradition,' Eph men's soccer coach T. Michael Russo added, and he wasn't the only one.

'Winning is a state of mind,' Tufts cross country coach Connie Putnam said. 'At Williams, the president wants to win, the provost wants to win, the deans want to win, primary givers like George Steinbrenner want to win, alumni want to win.'

'Williams has always been extremely strong, and by always, I mean for 100 years,' Tufts Athletic Director Bill Gehling said. 'It becomes self-fulfilling; when you have that reputation you attract kids. But in the last twenty years they took it to a new level. They were one of the first to have systematically efficient way of working with admissions.'

Both athletic directors noted that because Williams is so strong academically (Number one liberal arts school according to U.S. News and World Report, so we can't even start a 'One day you'll work for us' chant), the Ephs have the potential to steal Ivy League student-athletes. Not Big Ten athletes, which is unfortunate, because I can't decide what would be more fun, sitting next to Maurice Clarrett in math class or heckling him on the field. But still, Ivy League is Div. I.





But that's not even the most amazing thing. In the latest Princeton Review, Williams was ranked seventh in the nation in 'Students Pack the Stadium.' That's out of all divisions. Ahead of Georgia, Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Texas. Come again?

'That's a little bit tainted in the sense that we're a small school,' Quinn admitted. 'If the question is, "have you attended an athletic event," well, most of the school plays varsity athletics, so they've attended an athletic event.'

(Williams also ranked fifth in 'Everyone Plays Intramural Sports.' Ask yourself, if Tufts was ranked fifth in that category, would I really have been able to win two IM tennis crowns and come within a missed lay-up - not mine - of an IM basketball title? Story coming soon.)

The primary reason is probably location.

'There's nothing to do there except go to the games,' Putnam said. 'Here in Boston you could be going to the Pops, the Bruins, the Celtics, any one of nine libraries. It's a completely different lifestyle.'

'Other schools use it against us in recruiting,' Quinn said. 'They'll say, "what are you going to do up there?" Well, you're going to create a close bond with your team, you're going to excel at athletics, you're going to get a great education, and you're going to get the traditional college experience you might not get in a large metropolitan setting' (read: Tufts).




'[Tuft’s] challenge is to continue to try to rise to the top in an incredible conference," Gehling [a Tufts coach] said. 'I admire Williams. People throw rumors around, 'they accepted this kid that they shouldn't have,' but by and large I think they share the same perspective and commitment to academics and athletics as the other NESCAC schools.'

Now, [trailing after Williams] isn't the end of the world. It's not like choosing the wrong president or anything potentially disastrous like that. And we did have the first American football game. We think. And personally, as a student, I'm pretty happy we've got Boston. Would it be more fun if the athletic scene was a little better, or one of the big sports (football, basketball) was a year-in year-out powerhouse? Sure. But if that's what I was looking for, I would have gone to Duke. And after all the corruption that goes on in Div. I sports, if you give me a choice between too much emphasis on athletics or too little, I'm going with the latter.

At least this way, when I sat next to soccer star Todd Gilbert in Antebellum and Civil War History, I knew he was earning his C+, just like me.
"