Welcome to The Phoenix’s weekly digest. Every week during the quarter, you can expect our writers’ takes on some campus happenings.

This week, Alec Stein reflects on the status of student-athletes at the University.

They have backpacks, sweaters, and sweats, and on the first day of your discussion section, their fun fact is that they run or jump or participate in any of the other D3 sport offerings here at the University of Chicago. About five hundred student-athletes roam this school. I participate in Cross Country and Track: a three-season grindstone. But we’re a mirage to those NARPs (Non-athletic regular people, to use a derisive term) outside our bubble. Sure, we’re taken care of athletically (coaching, locker rooms, etc.), but the average student? They don’t care about us at all. 

I could tell my roommates, all of them NARPs, that Women’s Cross Country finished second in the nation last year or that the Distance Medley Relay team took home the national title. I would get a shrug at most, or maybe a little surprise about how good our athletics really are. Who’s to blame them? I certainly don’t. The fact is, the Reg was built on the rubble of our 50,000-seat D1 stadium. UChicago pride has always come from shared academic suffering, not watching a football game or running a cross-country course. 

Nonetheless, the athlete is here, and it feels like the ‘student’ gets wrapped up around it rather than jostled in front. Academics take place around practice, around injuries and sickness, around Fridays and Saturdays used for track or cross country meets. Is it any wonder that our athletics feels… insular? Some of that is because the teams stick together socially, but it’s also wrapped up in the popular idea that athletics doesn’t really happen here. Venture into Crown at the wrong time or make the long foray to Stagg and you might catch glimpses, but to the average NARP, athletics is just another activity.

For us, however, our ‘team’ is as close to a family as will ever be found outside the comforts of home. We are thrown into it the moment we step on campus and transform with it as we become those very same upperclassmen we once admired. Even while wearing our Maroon lettering for race day, it often feels like we’re representing our team more than our school. Most students see it the same way. 

Athletics here is compressed: shoved beyond 56th Street and into little bubbles of community that have less presence on campus than many pre-professional clubs. 

So the question becomes: do we like it this way? Should the student bring the athlete back into the fold? To me, the answer is yes. A greater focus on athletics would create a more cohesive school culture—one that celebrates as well as self-deprecates. Because, let’s be honest, the ‘quirky UChicago’ has long since lost most of its meaning; what’s left is a preprofessional quagmire and the decision to either suffer through Honors Calculus or sleepwalk through Global Warming. 

Let us celebrate something collectively, even if it’s just the small minnows of athletic success. And for those academic purists worried about my proposal, don’t; we’re still a D3 school with a football program whose highest aspirations are buried under the first nuclear reactor and the B-level.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts, disagreements, or words of support, we want to hear them! Write to us at thechicagophoenix@gmail.com.