Flashes of Panic

This morning I attended a meeting of the Friends of Athletics for my college. I’ve been a member for three or four years—since I felt like I had enough money to give—but this is the first time I’ve been free on the day of the Annual Meeting.

As a track and cross-country athlete at The College, I always felt like The Alumni represented a sort of looming cloud at the athletic department, pressuring coaches and administrators to take whatever steps were needed for a winning football/baseball/basketball team, and to heck with anyone else. The Dead White Male lobby, to perpetuate a stereotype. I wanted to go to the Friends meeting to see how it really worked.

As expected, yes, all white males. I was the youngest attendee, also not surprising, but there was one member only five years older. On the other side of the scale was “the junior member,” a gentleman who graduated in 1937, if I am not mistaken. In addition to the athletic director, there were nine of us. Once prompted with my name, the AD successfully remembered my sport as well, which I was slightly impressed with; my collegiate career was hardly memorable, perhaps distinguished mostly by the abysmal performance of the teams I led my sophomore and junior years.

One thing put to rest immediately in my mind was the influence of the Friends. With a membership hovering below 900, our annual budget would have a hard time financing a full scholarship, if the College gave such things. As it turns out, the primary use of the Friends budget is financing various assistant coaches on loan from the three or four graduate programs in the area. The College gets energetic, fresh assistants, and the graduate programs (sports management at UMass, sometimes the MBA or exercise physiology programs, and small grad programs at Smith and Springfield College,) get to give their students real-world experience. (One such assistant is now the head track and cross-country coach—actually, one such assistant is now the AD.) Ironically, they seldom work with football, which has its own core of people. The AD emphasized that the Friends’ support was the core of this program—in fact, one of the attendees serves on a few committees at nearby WNEC, and he explained that they lacked the money or support to do anything similar, though they would prefer to.

The Friends used to finance equipment for the Fitness Center which I am fortunate enough to enjoy access to, but it was endowed a few years ago and no longer requires our help.

It developed that the real driving force behind the department’s moves is more likely to be anonymous or semi-anonymous alumni or parent donors with a project in mind. One such project discussed was installing artificial turf and lights on one of the athletic fields; apparently this sort of project can take years due to objections from students, faculty and the community on ecological or quality-of-life grounds. The College already has lights installed on one field and the AD suggested that the turf and lighting upgrade might be easier there, since it would be just an upgrade rather than a new installation of lighting. I was ambivalent about this.

This swung the conversation around to the parking lot. (You thought I’d forgotten!) The AD’s opinion was that the objections to the original plan were silly—“It’s already a parking lot, …their objections don’t make sense,”—but he was lobbying team captains to try to get athletes to give up their parking permits, since one of the alternative plans was to use the “upper tennis courts” as a temporary lot, and he’d rather see no lot than one on the tennis courts.

The graduate from the ’30s treated us to a story about how, in his days, no students were allowed cars on campus, since Amherst was a dry town even after the repeal of Prohibition, and the students tended to drive to Springfield, drink themselves sick on “rotgut hooch,” then get in wrecks on their way home. “So,” he concluded, “if we could restrict the students’ privilege to have cars on campus then, why can’t we do it now?”

All in all, I was pleasantly impressed by the meeting, which was not malevolent in the least. I wonder, though, how long it will be until women begin showing up at the meeting; the College has been coed for a bit less than thirty years now, I think.