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athletes Student or athlete? Not both July 4, 2001 PAW I am thrilled to see the issue of recruited athletes back on the table, because I think the presence of recruited athletes detracted appreciably from my Princeton experience. Though I avoided the classes that all undergrads knew to be easy and therefore attractive to elite athletes (there is a long list and it is common knowledge), I found that many of the athletes in my classes would show up without having read the material and, much more seriously, unready even to try to engage in the subject matter. I think this is simply because elite athletes don’t have the time and energy to also be elite students. Not only must varsity athletes attend rigorous practices, but through team bonding they are drawn into powerful social cliques that swallow much of their off-field time and, through mechanisms too complex to enter into here, deprecate academic pursuits. I simply don’t think Princeton can offer both an outstanding academic and an outstanding varsity athletic experience (if you call winning a national championship outstanding); the two are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the best athletic experience depends on a sense of personal and team honor, and respect for the opponent, rather than from dreams of national glory and a potential future as a pro. Not that I accuse Princeton’s varsity athletes of bad spirit, but our current system certainly promotes something other than the fundamentals of sport. It must do so, because the fundamentals of sport come easily, without high price tags and elite training. As an example of what I consider a good athletic experience on campus, I offer Clockwork Orange, the Princeton Ultimate Frisbee team(s). Ultimate is a club sport, administered completely by students themselves, and receives very little funding other than field-space from the university last I heard. When I used to practice with the team, in the late ’90s, there were perhaps 30 students, men and women, who would come out to two or three practices a week and drive long distances to weekend tournaments. Often Ultimate players would be those who hadn’t made it in other sports — I had never played any sport well—and it was beautiful to see these people learn and teach each other all the lessons that team sports offer. The kicker is that these kids were really interesting people, who would mock each other in pregame poetry (I remember one particularly grand spoof of Chaucer that went on for pages and pages), and who, when exams came around, would let their sport fall by the side so that they could achieve their academic goals. None of them had “come to Princeton to play Ultimate.” Princeton’s recruiting of athletes is equivalent to offering sports scholarships, because the degree is valuable and is made affordable to all who are admitted. It is my fervent wish for Princeton that the administration will someday find the chutzpah to abolish recruitment. The athletics department will then be able to focus on supporting sport as a spirit-building rather than a horn-blowing activity. George Showman ’99 Respond
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