A common perception held by some students is that Emory Athletics and the University at large lacks school spirit. Granted, no student comes to Emory expecting Southeastern Conference levels of school pride, whether it’s thousands of people attending sporting events or intoxicated dads tailgating in parking lots. You would expect, however, that an athletics program with 27 NCAA national championships would exhibit greater pride than it currently does.
Some blame our perceived lack of spirit on not having a football team or on our athletes competing at the Division III level. Others claim Emory students are too stressed and overwhelmed by schoolwork to partake in activities outside of studying, specifically athletics. While these factors may play a role, I believe they are cop-outs that fail to address the larger institutional and cultural causes that are responsible for the average student’s apathy toward Emory Athletics.
A clear cause of weak enthusiasm toward Emory sports is its current lack of promotion. Many students are naive to when Emory teams compete, with some not even knowing what sports we have. I believe some don’t realize teams are competing until they accidentally stumble upon a basketball game while cutting through the Woodruff Physical Education Center (WoodPEC) to reach the Peavine Parking Deck.
Illustration by Ally Hom
Even as an athlete who spends countless hours in the WoodPEC, I’m still surprised sometimes when other teams are competing. This isn’t the fault of students but of the various campus organizations that are responsible for advertising athletic events. As an underclassman, I felt as if finger-painting in the basement of Dobbs Hall received more promotion than the volleyball team winning the NCAA tournament in 2018.
A real incentive must exist for students to watch or attend Emory sporting events. The University attempts to entice student engagement with material items and sometimes even mandates it. Whether it’s necessitating attendance as a first-year PACE 101 requirement or rewarding students with free T-shirts if they attend a certain number of games, Emory may be able to artificially increase the amount of spectators in the bleachers, but this “gamification” of student participation does little to create an organic and sustainable environment of school pride.
To create a tangible sense of community and support for one’s school and athletic programs, there must be a social incentive that draws students. None of the state schools we see enjoying intense school pride are able to fill up massive stadiums just because every person in the crowd is passionate about football.
No, fans consistently show because games are exciting social hours, allowing students to meet with and cheer alongside friends and classmates. Sporting events can serve as great mediums for student engagement and relationships that would never have been formed otherwise, regardless of one’s interest in sports. There is no reason why our multiple top-ranked teams can’t serve as a platform to connect Emory students.
One frustrating consequence of Emory’s lack of school spirit is the perceived divide between athletes and the rest of the student body. Obviously, the student-athlete college experience is markedly different than that of non-athletes, but the lack of enthusiasm toward Emory sports has imbued feelings of bitterness into the student-athlete population.
This is best seen through the commonly used term “NARP,” which stands for “non-athletic regular person” and carries a negative connotation among student-athletes. The name implies that any student who does not brandish the blue Powerade bottle is less than. These dynamics only further divide Emory’s campus and harm the little school spirit Emory has.
Encouraging support of Emory Athletics is not simply for the benefit of Emory athletes but also for the school as a whole. While Emory students boast some school spirit, it appears in small pockets through clubs and extracurriculars. What is sorely lacking, however, is a cohesive sense of school spirit in which all students share, and there is no better way to cultivate that spirit than through sports.
Calvin Furbee (22C) is from Columbus, Ohio, majoring in business administration and environmental science. He is a member of Emory's swim and dive team. An Ohio State Buckeye fan since birth, Furbee is also interested in urban design and American history.
This seems like too easy a solution that would not suffice. The fact is that Emory’s lack of school spirit has partly to do with the student body wanting to over-rely on pre-organized institutions like Greeklife (so students will blame admins for going after them as some sort of fun killer) and sports (and maybe a few other socially oriented ECs) for fun and events and seem to lack creativity when it comes to this. There are plenty of schools (D1, D2, D3) that have a very similar disposition towards integrating varsity athletics into the social atmosphere (as they really don’t) yet these places still have lots very interesting student created social traditions apart from sporting events and Greek life. There is no reason to limit oneself to galvanizing around these things. Emory students are bright and many have quite the imagination. Why not use it to create or lobby for new social traditions. Some of them can be quirky like those at our “nerdy” and more intellectual peer schools and others can be something entirely different.
I would think outside of this and maybe start hitting up campus life folks, reslife folks, faculty (maybe people like Pamela Scully as she is involved in undergrad affairs), whoever to develop some more traditions around reslife or other things at the schools. Emory College is a relatively young institution which may explain the lack of traditions beyond homecoming, Songfest, and Dooley’s week, but at this point, people need to be more creative than simply settling for “just make varsity sports fervor a bigger thing on campus”. I’m all for that, but also be creative and come up with things more unique to Emory as opposed to stereotypical routes that have historically not been a part of generating “spirit” at Emory. Surely we can do a little better than “pre-organized fun”. Sometimes I feel like even Oxford which is far smaller and more isolated has more interesting traditions. With the THOUSANDS of undergrads on the Atlanta campus at any point in time, you mean to tell me that at least students can’t effectively lobby for or go out on a limb to create spirit generating traditions. “Let us just promote sports and support Greek life more” won’t cut it. If it was the answer, I suspect it would have happened a long time ago.