BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published February 3, 2011

Whether from superstition or just habit, athletes can fall into certain routines before practices and games. Rain or shine, they do the exact same thing to prepare to play, whether that be how they get dressed, the music they listen to, or where they sit in the locker room. But some days just aren’t like every other day: for me, Sept. 9 of last year was one of those days.

Instead of pulling on our team’s practice gear like I did every other day, I pulled on a dress; instead of cleats, I put on a pair of heels. I then headed out to the field. Juggling with teammates and trying not to pull a Marilyn Monroe, I realized how ridiculous I looked to anyone passing by. A team matching in every way, plus those three weird girls trying not to get turf pellets stuck to their stockings.

We hadn’t lost a bet, or pulled a prank on our coaches. It was Rosh Hashanah and we were heading to services, but had stopped by practice beforehand. As odd as the situation felt, I was thankful that it was only a practice we were missing. A few months before, we had been scheduled to play an away game that day, which I and the other Jews on the team would have had to miss. Not all Jewish student-athletes at Swarthmore had been so lucky as to have their games rescheduled. The men’s soccer team had one of their biggest games of the season against Johns Hopkins on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in our religion.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a column about the conference rule when it came to scheduling competitions during religious holidays. The conference manual then, and now, specifically stated that no conference matches should be scheduled on religious holidays or on Sundays. While this seems like a simple rule, the policy that the league follows is now much more complicated.

The problem of scheduling conflicts and religious holidays was discussed at the latest meeting of Athletic Directors, according to Swarthmore’s Associate Athletic Director Christyn Abaray. They agreed on what Abaray described as a type of religious indifference. Under this policy, the league would schedule games without taking religious holidays into account but would also make it possible for athletic directors to reschedule games because of their players’ religious conflicts “without resistance.” This policy would thus allow the executive director of the conference to create the game schedule without having to schedule around both known and unknown religious conflicts, and would avoid appearing callous toward some religions and not others. It would also allow individual institutions the autonomy to adjust their schedules according to the conflicts of their own student-athletes.

While this policy attempts to alleviate some of the headache of coordinating between schools with such diverse student bodies, it is far from perfect. First of all, it puts the burden of asking for religious equality on student-athletes. In order to reschedule a game, a student would have to recognize that there was a conflict and bring it up with a coach or administrator before the athletic director could start the process of having a game moved. Completing all three of these is not always easy, and leaves plenty of places for students to fall between the cracks. Also, coaches often do not know the religious affiliations of their incoming first-years, which may leave only a matter of weeks for a game to be rescheduled for fall athletes. Additionally, there is the problem of publicizing the policy; it is not written down anywhere that is accessible to students. Religious student-athletes may not even know that rescheduling games is a possibility, not to mention that some players, especially underclassmen or those who do not play as many minutes, may feel uncomfortable asking their teammates, coaches and administrators to move an entire game on their account and may feel pressured not to speak up.

Then there is the issue of numbers: how many students need to have a conflict before it warrants a game reschedule? While Abaray and Athletic Director Adam Hertz have said that it would only take one student or coach to have a religious conflict for a game to be moved, there is no way to know if other institutions will be as understanding and as willing to go through the hassle of rescheduling a conference game.

If conference administrators are going to stick to this policy, they need to have some safeguards in place to make sure that the religious beliefs of all of their student-athletes are being protected. Next season, for the fall sports of women’s field hockey, women’s volleyball and men’s and women’s soccer, there are a total of 29 conference games scheduled on either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. That is a lot of games that could have to be rescheduled, and that is only accounting for one religion’s holidays in one athletic season.

Having to coordinate the schedules and potential conflicts of so many institutions is a Herculean task, especially given the other restraints of Division III athletics in which the academics schedule always has to be given preference.

There must be a way to fit all conference games into the season and also protect the religious beliefs of student-athletes. The new policy is better than that of previous years when the religious holiday regulation was merely ignored, but both students and administrators should continue to work towards a more comprehensive policy.

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