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December 02, 2004
Colgate 63, Vermont 80
Small-time sports is fun. It means you root for a team that loses year after year, but it means the people playing are dedicated to playing and have a strong sense of teamwork. And in the case of Colgate sports teams, it means they play even without scholarships (though as of this year, Colgate does at last offer some athletic grants-in-aid). And every once in a while it means you get to watch the team get game. In 2003, the Colgate softball team went to the NCAAs. Last year the football team played for the Division 1-AA championship, and the women's basketball team won the Patriot League and played in the NCAAs. Each time, we had the delight of listening to ESPN announcers marvel at the fact that the school enrolls fewer than 3,000 students and that it has no athletic scholarships. While the women played Tennessee, the announcers ruminated on what it meant for the team to have listened to Medcat prep tapes while en route to the game. (Two alumnae enrolled in med school this year, at Vanderbilt and Michigan.) That sort of stuff—the affirmation of sports for its own sake, without the anti-intellectualism; and the disruption of cynical assumptions about what college sports must be in order to be successful—is just fun.
Then there's the hard part: the coach who took the women to the NCAA tournament gets spirited away to coach at Northwestern, and yet another unknown quantity comes to Colgate to take her place. Maybe the new one will be a good coach, but statistically, that hasn't often happened. More often the women's basketball coach turns in a pretty dismal record for 3-6 years and then goes to coach at a Division III school in Pennsylvania. We've been Colgate fans for 20 years now, so we know the drill. The new coach, who came to Colgate from Case Western, is getting off to a very slow start with players who are as good as or better than last year's league winners. These are the moments where small-time sports fandom requires grit.
Posted by senioritis at December 2, 2004 09:34 PM