A few months ago, I decided to change the focus of my column. This was the sixth consecutive semester I had penned a weekly column, so to spice things up, I decided to focus solely on Tufts athletics.
The problem is, these columns have been about as spicy as water.
To my knowledge, no one had ever attempted to write a column exclusively on Tufts sports, and now I know why. It's extremely difficult. But, as with any experiment, I learned a few things along the way.
1. The Athletic Department is a closed community. Athletic Director Bill Gehling runs a tight-lipped department. When I wanted to investigate how Title IX works at Tufts, all I was told by the department is the basic law it is required to follow, and that Tufts is acting within that law. When I asked the coaches whose players had said that things weren't always equal between men and women, the coaches replied that they had never really had a problem.
There's more. One of the assistant trainers left over the weekend. The only way I know is because her name no longer appears on the website. When I asked the head trainer, Mark Doughtie, why she was gone, he replied, "I have no idea."
Odd, isn't it, that the head trainer has no idea why a member of his staff no longer shows up to work. At present, I can't write why she's gone, other than the fact that she was fired.
2. Promised changes are slow, if they happen at all. My first column this semester was about the lackluster condition of the intramural program. In response to my column, and recognizing the obvious need for improvement of a program that caters to a large population of Tufts students, both Gehling and Assistant Athletic Director Branwen Smith-King told me that I would be asked to serve as a consultant on how to improve intramurals.
We are a few weeks away from the start of the winter season - which includes basketball, one of the most popular intramural sports - and I am still waiting for my phone to ring.
I have a whole list of changes, but it appears that promises made about asking me were meant simply to appease an angry student with a voice.
There's more. When I wrote the column about the new basketball floor, I did some research of my own. I played on the court, and discovered that it was slippery and dirty. I also discovered that it wasn't just dust and dirt on the court, there were hairs on the court, as well. These hairs were the type of hairs that fall from guys when they scratch themselves, and I'm not talking about scratching their head because they're confused.
And not just a few isolated hairs, but armies of them all over the place. I mentioned this to Gehling as both a sanitary and aesthetic issue, and while the gym floor may be swept more regularly now, it's poor form when you need a college reporter to tell you how to maintain your new, $100,000 surface.
3. Covering Tufts athletes is a hazard. All athletes love to see their name in the paper - when it's associated with wins, points, goals, or first-place finishes. But when something is printed that doesn't paint the athlete in the most positive light, they blame the writers.
The women's cross-country team was going through a rebuilding season this year. It's understandable, two of its top runners from last year graduated. To expect anything more than an average season would have been unrealistic.
But as soon as the articles discussed the fact that they were losing, coach Kristin Morwick got upset with our writer. I edited all of those articles, and took out a lot of the sugar coating that our writer had included, so I can take the blame for making them sound less positive.
You know what, coach, when your team doesn't perform well, we can't write that they do. The articles did not trash the team, or its effort, they merely recorded the results.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to be covered, you are going to be covered, entirely and without bias. It's a message we have tried to send to the Athletic Department and its coaches for the past few years. We are not your cheerleaders. You have people that steal pom-pons to do that.
We write what happened, good or bad. Which leads me to number...
4. The Athletic Department doesn't do a good enough job of cheerleading for its teams. I discussed this in an interview with Gehling, and he said that he feels that attendance at games is a reflection of how the team is doing. And that is true to a point. But it is possible for the Athletic Department to put in a little more work to increase attendance.
Place seasonal sports schedules in the gym. Take out ads in the Daily, chalk, put up flyers. Make the games fun environments. Get the Bubs or Jills or the Gospel Choir to perform at halftime. Give away prizes, have raffles. Do all the things that other campus groups do to get the word out. But for God's sake, don't make your teams play in Cathedral-like environments.
There are more people in my methodology course (ten) than at a lot of volleyball and women's basketball games.
It's imperative that the athletic department do more to promote and advertise its teams, because like I said before, the Daily isn't going to do it.
