An ode to big-time Division I college athletics

I love sports. Plain and simple, they are the best thing ever. Why else would I have devoted several hours a week for the past year-and-a-half to be the sports editor of this great newspaper?

Over the past few years I have grown to be one of Blue Jay Athletics' biggest fans and supporters. From showing up at sparsely attended football and basketball competitions to snagging a spot at standing-room-only homecoming lacrosse games, it has been a fun ride. We have very accessible and well articulated student athletes at Hopkins, who have always made my job as a journalist relatively easy.

Yet I can't help but wonder what it would be like to attend a college with 'big time' athletics. Yes, I know we have Division I lacrosse, and that's well and good. But when I say 'big time' I'm referring to the two highest grossing college sports: football and basketball. These two behemoth sports have the ability to transcend athletics, by both increasing school spirit and serving as a major source of revenue for the schools.

I always wondered what it would be like to tailgate in the parking lot of the 'The Swamp' (Florida), or the Los Angeles Coliseum (USC), or 'The Big House' (Michigan) on a Saturday morning, kicking back a few beers before cheering on your football team along with 100,000 other hard-core classmates, alumni and local fans in a setting where every game has major significance. Or what would it be like to camp out in Krzyzewskiville outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium (Duke) before watching college basketball from one of the world's most exciting venues? Homewood Field is nice, but it doesn't hold a candle to these places.

I'm not saying we are devoid of school pride. We rally around our lacrosse team in the spring, with our homecoming and Spring Fair conveniently set within a few weeks of each other. In fact, as I write this article from my dorm room in Beijing, China, 6,900 miles from Hopkins, I'm wearing a Hopkins hoodie and a Blue Jay hat. But pride and spirit are two different things. Pride is the satisfaction we get from being an elite academic institution. Spirit comes from uniting the campus through some other means, such as athletics ?- and the fact remains that it's not easy to get a majority of the Hopkins student body excited about lacrosse.

There are several reasons for this, the prime one being that lacrosse is a very regional sport. Most of our lacrosse team is from either Long Island or Maryland, which makes sense as these are the two biggest lacrosse hotbeds in the country. Outside of these areas, very few kids grow up playing lacrosse. As a result, only a small portion of the student body knows the rules and strategies of the game - something paramount to truly enjoying the sport and getting passionate about it. At least for me, someone who grew up in California and Florida, I had virtually no exposure to the game. Upon watching it at Hopkins for the first time, aside from comprehending that the aim was to score more goals than the other team, I really had no idea what was going on.

Regardless, I learned to appreciate 'our sport' and our venue, and I found myself attending almost every home game, writing and editing articles on the outcome. There is no denying that having lacrosse as our only Division I sport truly does make Hopkins unique.

Until now I was content, but recent events have made me change my demeanor. My friend from back home who attends Cornell would always brag about how his school had a Division I basketball team (all Ivy League schools have Division I athletics) that was good enough to showcase its talents on national television during March Madness. My retort used to be that while they were getting destroyed by Stanford and Missouri in the first round of the tournament each year, Hopkins was busy winning national championships in lacrosse.But then came last spring, and while Blue Jay lacrosse suffered a record breaking loss in the quarterfinals, Big Red lacrosse made a playoff run and was one poorly played pass away from a national championship.

Then I started to get jealous.

During winter break, my Cornell friend took me to the Holiday Festival at Madison Square Garden where we took in two Division I college basketball games. The latter contest, the championship game, pit underdog Cornell against St. John's, a traditional basketball power from the Big East.

With all respect to Hopkins' basketball team, this game was played at another level - the athletes were faster, stronger and more intense. Each of the 347 Division I basketball team has a shot at making it to March Madness each spring, a chance to earn a berth in one of the most exciting sporting competitions ever and gain a chance to play on national television in front of millions. Each game brings a team closer to this goal, and there is more and more at stake with each successive game. Thus it was awesome to watch the Big Red play their hearts out as the underdog, with fans from both sides jeering and cheering, and pull out the upset against St. John's.

This tournament also proved to me that you do not need to have 25,000 students to support a big time basketball team. The first game featured Davidson College, which has a student body less than half the size of Hopkins'.

The atmosphere was great, and this game was not even played at a college campus arena, a venue which is usually smaller, denser and more exciting. Football is very similar. I've been in the stands at three Rose Bowls, and the atmosphere is unimaginably intense - with fans travelling from thousands of miles away to cheer on their team, usually standing throughout the entire competition. This past winter I was vacationing in San Diego, where Nebraska was playing in the Holiday Bowl. It was really fascinating to see hundreds of people, old and young, decked out in Nebraska Cornhusker gear strutting their university pride on the streets of the San Diego Harbor. The fact that they had trekked all the way from the Midwest simply to cheer on their team simply for a three-hour football game was an incredible show of school spirit.

Several local universities boast Division I basketball teams, including Loyola, Towson, Morgan State, Coppin State and UMBC. Georgetown and Maryland (2002 National Champion), each a Marc Train and short Metro ride from Baltimore, are home to two historic and very large college hoops programs as well. It is now a stated goal of mine to check out these teams as soon as possible.

I know we are a relatively small private school with limited space, small facilities and a tight budget. But that has not stopped me from dreaming about how neat it would be to be able to cheer for my team as it strived toward March Madness or a Bowl Game, and the impact on school spirit that could come along with it.