Fashion gurus attending Garnet Weekend’s home game line-up might not be huge fans of the orange shoelaces poking from the cleats and sneaks of Swarthmore athletes, but the “pop a color” initiative is seeking uniformity in more important ways than color coordination. In the wake of an emotional spring semester and the plethora of policy changes that hit campus this fall, the Athletics Department and Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) are announcing a new campaign to address issues of diversity and inclusion on Friday as students, parents and alumni rally to support athletics at the college.
SAAC is re-appropriating the slogan “Rise Up” from the Athletic Department’s Instagram campaign this summer to describe the initiative. The hashtag was originally designed to generate buzz around the fall competitive season. From “rising up” above the competition — and the ashes, in a reference to Phineas — SAAC’s campaign shifts the focus to “rising up” around more universal themes and issues — rising up as leaders, and rising up in celebration of inclusion and diversity on campus.
According to Richard Scott ’14, a member of the SAAC executive board and a co-captain of the men’s cross country team, the student-led campaign is a response to the shifting social and institutional landscape this semester at the college.
“Hearing about changes to assault policies, personnel changes, rules about parties on campus — all this stuff is changing, and as a student group we felt we wanted to just do something about all these changes we keep talking about,” Scott said. “We figure athletics is in a good place right now, why not start with athletics?”
“We’re always looking for opportunities to engage the community,” Director of Athletics Adam Hertz said of the campaign. “When the community is affected by an action, we want to respond to that and help wherever possible. We talk about leadership in athletics and through athletics and what that means, so this is an opportunity to […] take those leadership qualities and help the campus.”
The campaign, in some ways, diverges from SAAC’s typical function: serving as a liaison between athletes, coaches and the wider campus community and promoting awareness for the department. However, the goals aren’t mutually exclusive. Men’s soccer coach Eric Wagner sees the comparatively high attendance at the team’s home games to be reflective of the work his players do beyond the field — and beyond the college.
“We’ve worked extremely hard to build up our fan base,” Wagner said. “We’ve got kids from the high school, kids from the local youth soccer programs, parents and families from the local youth soccer organizations, alumni — for a small Division III team to draw the kind of local support that we draw is special, and it’s because we do a lot with the local youth soccer organizations and we do a lot with the local schools.”
Along with engaging the wider campus community, SAAC leaders also hope to develop a greater sense of intra-departmental coherency — a more solidified “sports culture” that extends beyond the friendships formed between teammates. Rose Pitkin ’14, the student athlete advisor to the Centennial Conference and senior advisor to SAAC, sees this as a first step to engaging with issues on-campus and generating more support for the program.
“It’s really hard to ask people who don’t come to any event to support you when you don’t even support yourself,” Pitkin said. “So that’s another thing SAAC has really been focused on, is building those inter-team relationships.”
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However, the extent to which the athletics department can serve as a unifying force seems to be up for debate. After hearing a member of SAAC’s executive committee present the initiative, a student who wished to remain anonymous (“Sam” will be used as a pseudonym) dubbed the endeavor “absurd.”
“I don’t think on this campus athletics plays a particularly unifying role, and I don’t want it to play a unifying role,” he said. “It’s frustrating because this campus so deeply does not care about sports.”
If attendance is used as a measure of student support for sports teams, it might be fair to generalize and say that the campus is ambivalent towards its athletic ambassadors. However, both Hertz and Wagner noted that attendance is affected by a plethora of factors — weather conditions, campus events, and time of day as a few examples. As mentioned previously, the men’s soccer team enjoys relatively high game day attendance, and many of the seniors interviewed remember attending the team’s bid for the Centennial Conference Championship in 2010.
Megan Brock ’14, a member of the women’s soccer team, said that although she misses the huge game-day turnouts from high school, she likes the fact that Swatties are involved in activities beyond those offered by way of the fieldhouse. In fact, that’s part of the reason she chose to attend Swarthmore — to put her hands in organizations and activities outside of athletics.
Although Sam feels that his opinions of athletics are stronger than those of most students on campus, many athletes noted smaller ways in which tensions between athletes and non-athletes manifest themselves at the college. Ian Lukaszewicz ’15, a member of the men’s lacrosse team, claims that comments made on the preferential treatment towards athletes in the admissions process often strike an unpleasant chord — especially since he feels his test scores and grades put him on the same academic level of other students. Stuart Russell ’14, a co-captain on the men’s cross country team, has heard students talk about “jock classes” — courses with a reputation for being less academically rigorous, which is used to explain, and explained by, high enrollment from certain sports teams. Brock noted that students sometimes complain about the “clique-ness” of sports teams, which practice, dine and socialize together on the weekends. In Pitkin’s opinion, conflation of “fraternity culture” and “sports culture” — and Division III athletics with Division I athletics — often leads to unfair stereotyping of athletes as a unified whole.
And then there’s the language: within the athletics department, the use of phrases like “up campus” — used to refer to the college’s academic and artistic endeavors — and “down campus” — the field house and athletic fields — further the impression of a divide between the department and the campus community. There’s also “bro” (as in “lax bro”) and “NARP” (a “non-athletic regular person”), terms not specific to Swarthmore but used to describe groups on campus.
The conversation on campus is historic. Near the time of the abolition of the football program in 2001, columns in The Phoenix offered a glimpse into the variety of opinions held on campus. From an editorial bemoaning a community dinner scheduled around a soccer game to a column equating the lingo used to describe a men’s sports team in the Daily Gazette with that used to oppress minority groups, the topic of athletics at an institution that, above all, prides itself on its intellectual prestige seems to experience cycles of particular salience.
The events of this spring, for Sam, render the “Rise Up” campaign especially ill-suited to addressing campus-wide concerns, and raise more important questions than the academic preparedness of athletes on campus or the rumored athlete-non-athlete social divide.
“The idea of the entire school rising up behind athletes all wearing orange shoelaces is […] deeply juvenile,” he said. “I think you can’t be paying attention if you think most people on this campus […] want to deal with questions around inclusion and support for everyone on this campus by getting behind athletics. There has been so much trauma and pain and aggression and oppression between sports teams, fraternities and different folks in the community of color that the idea is offensive.”
Scott, however, sees the Athletic Department as being as good a starting point as any.
“I don’t expect that this campaign will completely erase problems on this campus that deal with inclusivity and diversity,” Scott said. “But if we can help, if we can just do something, why not start with athletics? I don’t expect a higher campus movement to come of this, but it’s all related […] and hopefully we can make people feel welcome in our athletic community as a result.”
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Scott described one of the main goals of the campaign to be “expanding the concept of team” to encompass more than just athletics. Inherent in “team” are the qualities that sports foster in players: collaboration, support, and leadership.
The model doesn’t always work perfectly. Men’s soccer co-captain Jack Momeyer ’14 remembers team leaders encouraging younger players to avoid behaviors that they deemed characteristic of the “average Swattie” during his first year on the team, facilitating a sense of separateness from the wider community.
“There’s one person who comes to mind who was saying things like ‘don’t do this, you’ll turn into a Swattie’ and ‘don’t do that, you’ll turn into a Swattie,’” Momeyer said.
According to Momeyer, the team culture is much changed in years since; however, the incident — and the perception on-campus that similar incidents occur — depict the need for a greater emphasis on inclusion, in Scott’s opinion.
For Pitkin, inclusion necessitates moving beyond a “just go play” mentality, which can serve as a barrier to recognizing and celebrating difference. While attending the 2013 Nike LGBT Sports Summit this summer, she began to see the ways in which her own intersecting identities can come into play on the field.
“I struggled with being ‘I’m gay, but what does that matter to my sport?’” Pitkin said. “But I realized when I was there how important it is for me to be comfortable and open with all parts of my identity.”
Being comfortable and open means trusting teammates to recognize and respect the identities of all players — an ideal that the college aspires to in recognition of the diversity on campus.
“Sure, when I’m up to bat, I’m not thinking about my sexual orientation,” Pitkin said. “But when I come back in the dugout I want to know that my teammates aren’t going to be like, ‘oh, that pitcher is such a dyke’ or ‘oh, that’s so gay that she threw that pitch at you.’ I want to know that they’re going to respect my identity as much as they’d want me to respect theirs.”
With specifics of the campaign to come on Friday, SAAC and the Athletic Department give students more than one reason to head down to the fields this weekend. Whether you’re there to support the players or to support their support of the community, consider grabbing a dash of orange.
