John Washington is a journalism senior and opinion columnist for Mustang News. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
As a sports-obsessed kid constantly looking forward to the next time my dad would bring me to a local college sporting event, I always thought college just meant going to football games all the time. Now that I’m four years in, I can say with the utmost certainty that it is not. But maybe it should be?
The sports fan culture at Cal Poly, a school with 21 NCAA Division I teams, is pretty much nonexistent. The closest I’ve experienced to some sort of tribalism is the Blue-Green soccer rivalry with UC Santa Barbara (which, granted, is one of the biggest NCAA soccer games every year).
Outside of that single game a year, the only other notable example I have is listening to the group of drunk guys chant “left, right, left” as the opposing batters walk to the dugout at the baseball games. Most of my friends have never even attended a football game at the school.
Frankly, the general perception from students is that the sports teams are bad here. The most popular Division I sports at most colleges are football and basketball, which are teams at Cal Poly that have yielded very little success in recent years.
That’s not to say Cal Poly is bad at every sport – they’re absolutely not. In fact, they won the Big West Commissioner’s Cup last year for the first time. That award is given to the school with the most success in all conference sports, proving Cal Poly is highly competitive across the board, whether students know it or not.
But unless the most popular sports can start to warrant increased fanfare with their performances, I’d deem it unlikely the more accomplished teams will be able to drum up support from a larger portion of the student body.
When I see the community formed around college sports in the South, I can’t help but feel a little jealous. A lot of those allegiances are formed at an early age, with students having grown up in the area and having it passed on to them. In contrast, most Cal Poly students are not from the area and are not birthed into this type of cult-like fandom.
But because of this lack of existing sports culture when they step onto campus, students are far less inclined to see the sports teams as representatives for the school they go to. To most people, the student-athletes are just other people at the school doing other things.
What I think people somehow fail to consider is how fun it is to gather with your friends while talking all night long as a basketball game plays out in front of you, regardless of who wins.
If that doesn’t sound appealing to you, I imagine you have yet to discover the thrills associated with heckling, one of humanity’s oldest and most cherished traditions.
The communal aspects of sports fandom are incredibly rewarding. It is so easy to connect with people if you even do so much as pretend to care about the sports team they root for. And if you actually care, the trials and tribulations you will go through with other fans will bring your collective together, even while it’s surrounding a topic as silly as sports.
The sense of community accompanying fan culture is unlike any other I know. It is emotional, euphoric and downright unreasonable.
My dad first took me to a Stanford football game when I was around 5. Going to games became a tradition for us, and as the years went on, I began to notice the completely abnormal emotional connection I had developed with this team – and, consequently, the completely normal ones I had developed with my dad and the friends he let me bring along.
At Cal Poly, there are real sports storylines to latch onto for people who may not pay as much attention. Women’s Tennis is pushing for their second consecutive conference title, Aidan McCarthy ran the fastest indoor 800 meters by an American in NCAA history and Beach Volleyball is, like always, one of the top teams in the country.
Though there are certainly plenty of conflating factors involving the swimming and diving program being discontinued, the administration citing “rapidly evolving and changing NCAA Division I landscape” sounds to me like they are hinting at possible future cuts to other programs.
The responsibility of keeping the non-revenue sports alive is, of course, on the school. But if students need a little extra motivation to start supporting some of the teams on campus, maybe that distressing announcement is enough to spur them into action.
Now I am not asking you to put on face paint and camp outside the gym for weeks at a time like the very irrational students at Duke do to get tickets to games. But grab a few friends and bring them along to a game or two. You might like it. You might even want to get used to it.
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