Bryan Williams

If They Don’t Win, It’s Our Shame

I have never been, nor will I ever be, an athlete. I prefer to watch it all from a safe distance by occasionally attending basketball games, cheering on the Crew Team at the Genesee River, or elbowing my way into a seat at Ritter Arena. Yet even at this arm’s length vantage point, I can easily see that sports are under-supported at RIT.

If I were one of the Tigers playing on the field day-in and day-out, I’d feel mightily shafted. Games are poorly attended by spectators and, remarkably enough, by the players themselves. There’s a noticeable number of athletes who can’t always attend their own matches, let alone their own practices, due to conflicting class times. Let me repeat for clarity: Athletes at RIT are often forced to choose between doing well in classes or doing well on the field. I believe this to be a worrying and unnecessary cycle, an exercise in circular and self-perpetuating thought.

Athletes at RIT are considered hobbyists. They can’t be professionals, after all, because our school has a notoriously mediocre athletics program. These ‘hobbyist’ athletes, then, are considered to be playing sports as a mere recreation, an amusing if nonfunctional departure from their studies. As such, they are not afforded much help in arranging their class schedules to accommodate their rigid practice schedules, which causes them to miss valuable practices. So, while the teams do improve throughout the season, they don’t improve nearly as much as they ought to, and thus end up playing potentially disappointing and mediocre seasons.

But what if those athletes were given a little help via early course registration, as Student Government has suggested in one of its latest proposals? I bet that two things would happen: The first is that athletics at RIT would take a serious turn for the better. Athletes who can attend practice without worrying about deferring their graduation or routinely missing classes due to schedule conflicts will self-evidently perform better come game time. The second is that the general student body would be excessively and perhaps irrationally pissed off.

The argument against offering athletes early registration involves perceived inequality amongst students. Athletes, they say, should not be given preferential scheduling because it would signal that RIT was beginning to value athletics over academics. I find this argument confusing, because as I look around this Institute, it is clear that academics are the leading lady. Athletics, meanwhile, seem so far off center-stage that it can’t even place its big toe in the spotlight’s luminance, let alone dominate it. There is certainly room to grow the athletics program without shrinking our educational merit. One could even argue that, should it come at a price of reduced educational process, a slight increase in athletics would still be worthwhile for this campus. Man needs more than mere brainpower to be happy and healthy.

I think that RIT has a lot to gain by supporting its athletes. First, it would help grow RIT’s national prestige. We could spend the next hundred years arguing about garnering fame through an excellent basketball team, and whether or not that’s morally or intellectually desirable, but the results of that conversation would be meaningless. Duke, a damn fine school in its own right, has no doubt been made more successful as a result of its NCAA bids over the years.

There’s a more personal reason that I’d like to see RIT’s athletes succeed both on and off the field, though, and that has to do with campus culture. Four years ago, I arrived at a school that was more or less exactly what I expected it to be: heavy on the academics and light on life. I have six more months ‘til graduation. If I could do it all over again, I probably wouldn’t come here. My education has been stellar, certainly, but my overall college experience has been on life support for some time now.

I wish I could have heard people cheering on the Quarter Mile during Homecoming, and it would have been nice to feel like there was a community here that wasn’t based on classes and whining about the stormy weather. I wanted to feel and see and taste Tiger Pride. I am not delusional, in that I do not believe that supporting our athletes via early registration would instantly usher in an age of Division I Prosperity at RIT. I do, however, believe that it’s a reasonable step towards improving the quality of life on this campus.