The Fanhood Problem

This past Saturday during Winter Carnival, everybody and their mother showed up to the Snow Bowl, rowdy and retro and revved up to support the ski team. It was a sight to behold: dozens of kids tailgating in the parking lot, snagging free popcorn samples and trekking up the mountain to reach the “cheering zone.” Despite the wipeouts (myriad) and the cold (manageable), everyone present had what ze Germans refer to as a superfunthyme.

And yet, if one were to actually tally up the number of Midd Kids who showed up to the mountain, he or she would be hard pressed to break 200. Fewer than one-tenth of the Middlebury student body showed up to the races, despite the fact that the entire reason Winter Carnival exists is to celebrate the ski team’s only home race of the year.

If one takes a step back and looks at the big picture here, the issue is clear: Middlebury does a woefully negligent job promoting its athletics. The Winter Carnival races are the perfect example. In order to get fewer than one in 12 students to show up to their race, the ski team had to put up posters themselves, doing their best to plaster the walls of Proctor, McCullough etc. with pictures of racers, funny quotes and friendly reminders that yes, in fact, the ski team has a race this weekend.

After killing themselves year-round as Middlebury’s only D1 athletes (get out of here, squash), getting up at six a.m. every morning of winter term to train while the rest of campus slumbered drunkenly and traveling every weekend to ski at other schools’ home mountains, the ski team had to run around campus putting up posters of themselves. They were essentially begging people to take the time to show them a little love.

This problem is far from unique to the ski team; indeed, every athletics team on campus is forced to do their own advertising. From hanging posters to making Facebook events, it is up to the teams to let people know that “WE HAVE A GAME — PLEASE COME!” The school provides very little advertising or general support to its teams in terms of fostering fan support and school spirit or in terms of aiding the teams’ general relationship with the campus as a whole. The sports games are buried in the dense, lengthy “Campus Events” emails that nobody has taken the time to parse through since Moses was blubbing in the bulrushes.

These athletes don’t want to be advertising their own events. As a friend of mine on the ski team said, “we don’t want to be bragging about ourselves — we want the school to be bragging for us!” Humor aside, he’s right. The school doesn’t “brag” for its athletes, publicize athletic events effectively or do much of anything to promote its teams.

Middlebury is an incredible place. Our sine qua non, the quality that defines us, is our diversity — of thought, of socioeconomic and cultural background, of interests. But the flipside to that coin is that we lose out on one of the central unifying experiences for any college: fervent fanhood of a school team. One of the best parts about attending a school like the University of Colorado, Ohio State University or any of their large state-school brethren is that the butcher, the baker, the music maker and everyone in between has a powerful connection to their respective university as a result of their fanhood of the school’s sports teams. In Boulder, whole swaths of town are deserted on Saturday afternoons in the fall because you’re either watching the football game, or you’re getting a beer poured on your noggin by someone who’s mad that you’re not watching the football game.

Strong athletics programs can be an unmatched unifying force when effectively utilized by a school. And the frustrating thing is that here at Midd, our sports teams are without a doubt good enough to galvanize the community. And yet year after year, they go uncelebrated, toiling away in relative anonymity while they should be having their achievements yodeled from the mountaintops. Every year, one or two teams are NESCAC or national champions; every year one or two individual athletes are the best in their sports. Unfortunately, much of campus probably doesn’t know that.

A more aggressive stance toward championing athletics wouldn’t just help unify the school or the community — it would also surely benefit the College’s alumni relations, which in turn results in financial improvements. When alumni wish to stay up to date with their alma mater, it’s not like they say, “Oh boy, I wonder what’s going on with the economics department! Oh, they hired a new Macro Theory professor? Yippee!” Much of the time, alumni are following a sports team. If Middlebury’s current students become more involved in and pumped about sports teams, they are sure to maintain that passion in post-college life (non-life? vapid and boring existence?), and remain more involved with the school, donating more and contributing to the College in any number of ways.

I’m not here to propose a solution. I don’t know how the College should fix what I like to call its Fanhood Problem. Weekly athletic event emails, school-sponsored posters, separate poster space for athletic teams in public spaces, personal visits from Leibo to the freshman halls to play flipcup and chat about basketball — I don’t know how the school should fix the problem. I just know that the problem definitely exists.

If we don’t fix it, than Middlebury’s greatest strength — its diversity — will continue to be one of its greatest weaknesses. And I, for one, would hate to see that happen.