“My middle school’s resources were better,” a UChicago pole vaulter tells me. She has been training competitively since she was eight years old. 

Athletics at UChicago, quite simply, suck. Our hundreds of NCAA Division III student-athletes across eighteen different teams face major hurdles. Take the men’s throwing team who have one weight for six athletes, the pole vaulters without an outdoor mat, or the cross-country and track and field teams with no assigned trainers throughout the year. It is a truly sorry story. 

The University of Chicago wasn’t always like this. As many of us often boast, Jay Berwanger won the first Heisman Trophy. However, Berwanger is not the only success story in the history of UChicago athletics. We produced Olympians (including gold medal winners like Jim Lightbody), won seventy-three Big Ten (yes, Big Ten) team titles in the early 1900s, and won national football titles in 1905 and 1913. So, how did we get here, and how do we understand this unfortunate phenomenon at UChicago more holistically? 

Enter Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University’s fifth president. Hutchins was passionate about academics—and only academics. That’s why, in December 1939, he dropped the football team. In its entirety. By 1946, a year after Hutchins left office to serve as the University’s chancellor, UChicago left the Big Ten Conference. Stagg Field, which had (almost unimaginably) a capacity of 50,000 at the time, was left barren. Ironically, in a move that would surely make Hutchins proud, Stagg’s original location now hosts the Regenstein and Mansueto Libraries. 

Hutchins left the University in 1951 and in 1969 the Maroon football team came back to life. Well, sort of. UChicago joined the NCAA Division III in 1973 and reopened a vestigial Stagg a few blocks away with a capacity of just over 1,600. 

Athletics at UChicago has never fully recovered. From 1973-1995, not a single University team achieved a top-4 finish in the NCAA Division III finals. 

Hutchins was passionate about academics—and only academics. So, he dropped football entirely 

In search of clarity on the current state of our athletics program, I spoke to those who know it best. Several student-athletes told me there are currently only three athletic trainers for all varsity athletes. Three individuals to support, train, recover, diet, and condition hundreds of athletes. 

Similar problems persist for individual teams. 

In normal times, the men’s track and field, particularly the “throwers”— those who participate in the shot put, discus, javelin, and hammer events—have only one weight for the hammer throw. When I spoke to two of the six men on the team, they had none (a new one was being ordered). A second-year thrower explained the consequences. “When we throw weight, we have to resort to heavy chains attached to wires or under-weighted weights.” The downstream effects on performance needn’t be repeated. In high school, these athletes had, at the very least, a ratio of one weight per person. At UChicago, they have one for every five. It would have been one for every six had the fellow I interviewed not dropped from the team. 

Elsewhere, the pole vaulting team (men and women combined) suffices with a single “bad quality” indoor mat. “When we have outdoor meets in the spring, we aren’t prepared for the different conditions that the outdoors presents,” a team member told me. 

Our cross-country and track and field teams have not had an assigned trainer since the end of last year. I was told the runners, sprinters, pole vaulters, throwers, and jumpers are instead left to independently reach out to other athletic trainers—who are already assigned to other varsity teams—for support. 

I then spoke to those on the University’s football team, many of whose high school teammates got recruited to schools like Ohio State and Michigan. They were similarly blunt in their assessment of UChicago’s program, referring to it as “closer to high school than Division I.” When pressed further, they elaborated on the significant differences in attendance at away games, even if those games are at smaller, rural schools. This could be a factor of student interests, but it’s also likely a factor of the school’s lack of promotion to the rest of the student body. Nonetheless, Stagg, while already tiny, rarely fills up. In fact, after speaking to all these athletes, none of them has ever seen it full to the brim. 

This reality means it is far more difficult for student-athletes at UChicago to compete at the highest level while already attending an elite academic institution. 

At this point, it is unsurprising to hear that the same is true for non-student-athletes, the majority of this institution, who are continuously trying to find avenues to take their minds off the rigor of academic life. For one, according to the official athletics website, “Sport Clubs will not be approved/ recognized if the University of Chicago provides varsity (and, in some cases, intramural) athletic opportunities in the same area of the proposed club activity.” If, for example, you are not one of the seventy or so students on the varsity soccer teams, the only official opportunities you have to play are intramurals: indoor soccer in the winter or outdoor soccer in the spring. With five games per team, assuming you can register a team before it fills up, you will play just over three hours of soccer in each quarter. 

This difficulty in accessing varsity sports perpetuates off-campus. Taking soccer as our example again, the University of Chicago Club Soccer Team, established in 2014 and unrecognized by the school, holds tryouts every fall for their roster of around twenty-five players. Almost two hundred students show up, with around five making it into the final team. Accordingly, hundreds of students anxiously await opportunities to release their energy in such a highly demanding environment. 

Even if you do make it onto one of these teams, all funding and organizing must be done internally since they are unrecognized by the school. The basketball team, for example, runs crowdfunding efforts and charges dues. For gym space, they told me they plead to the organizer to let them book a court for a scheduled game—which only gets approved three times a quarter. Otherwise, they’re at Ratner late at night to practice. 

Some teams, most notably the Tennis Club, have somehow skirted the varsity rule altogether. After asking ten members how they are an official RSO, I received a unanimous response: “It was here before my time; nobody knows.” 

Stagg, while already tiny, rarely fills up. None of the athletes I spoke to has ever seen it full 

There is clearly still some seeping residue of President Hutchins’s decision to prioritize academics at the cost of everything else. The University of Chicago is an academic institution and one of the most rigorous of its kind. However, that does not undermine the necessity for students to be able to compete at the highest level of athletics, as other schools prove. Moreover, the athletic history of the University—a unique storyline that differentiates UChicago from other institutions—necessitates a different outlook. With such a rich tradition of athletic triumph, there exists an underlying expectation to provide as much as possible to its student-athletes. Right now, that expectation isn’t being met. 

Such circumstances make our students’ recent successes all the more impressive and are a testament to their resilience. Last year, UChicago clinched the DIII men’s and women’s national tennis titles. In the 2022–2023 academic year, Julianne Sitch became the first female to coach a men’s soccer team to a title when UChicago won the NCAA DIII championship. At the end of last November, the women’s cross-country team finished runners-up of their equivalent championship. 

These results are incredible given the context. But there is still a lot to improve. As one of our leading football players sums it up, “We don’t need all the nice and fancy stuff.” We aren’t asking for another Heisman trophy or the resurrection of Stagg’s 50,000-seat glory days, but just imagine for a moment what we could be if the school met our athletes halfway.