C Bush's post about the seasonality of baseball got me thinking about my own spring time sports associations. In February, the lake near my apartment was frozen 6 inches deep, so the university sent out an e-mail inviting everyone to ice skate. The cold snap lasted for a couple of weeks, before the temperatures swung erratically up and down again. Nearly every morning, I drive by the school's boathouse, out of which the crew teams train, and when I saw an 8-person shell out on the water one March day, I thought, “finally, Spring!”

It's an idyllic sight—the long, narrow shell with eight oars slicing the water in unison toward the small stone bridge, the sunlight making the water sparkle as a light wind kicks up ripples along the surface—and it makes me terribly nostalgic for my own college rowing days, the only time in my life when I could identify as an athlete. Never having participated in organized sports, except for one unremarkable season on the track team in high school, I tried out for novice crew, because it required no prior experience and no hitting, catching, or throwing of balls of any kind. It's a grueling and beautiful sport--if the eight rowers sychronize their bodies just right, as if they were one giant muscle, the oars can lift the boat off the water just enough to make it feel like you're levitating. It's an incredible feeling. Rowing defined the bulk of my undergraduate experience, until I decided to quit in the middle of my senior year, because I wanted to know what college would be like without crew. I haven't been back on the water since, but I still miss it when I see those shells on the lake.

Rowing for a small liberal arts college (Division III) is certainly nothing compared to playing Division I football or basketball at a large public university or even to the level of competition at the private university where I work, and where athletes are recruited for many teams. And I don't have any idea what it's like to be groomed for big-time pre-professional sports from the age of 7. But given that gap, I think my brief stint as an athlete—an identity I simultaneously embraced and felt like I was merely impersonating—has made me a more empathetic teacher than I otherwise might have been, though it's not always easy.

At my current school, sports is a big part of campus life for a majority of students, and some students arrive already as world-class athletes in such sports as squash or fencing or golf. Most of the students won't be going pro, but excelling at sports is a major facet of the trajectory of success for these overachievers. Because my main focus now is on my students' academic progress, I can't help but get angry at the nameless and faceless coaches who put seemingly unreasonable demands on my students' time and energy. The hockey player who had to leave several of my classes early because his coach wanted his players to rest up in their hotel rooms before their game, the water polo player who had to fly out to California and miss a half-week of classes, and so on . . . it's hard not to think about all the progress they could make on their papers if they weren't consumed by their sports.

At the same time, their dedication to their sport, their utter loyalty to their team and coach are familiar to me. Sports are the ritualized form of whatever it is that makes the sharing of arduous physical experiences such an effective social glue. The feeling of belonging and sanctioned conformity that being part of a team allows are powerfully attractive when you're 18 (or any age, for that matter). Being a crewbie meant that we endured a lot of pain and liked it, it meant we got respect when we were in the weight room with the beefy football players, it meant being initiated into a special language, and handling very expensive equipment. And for me, it meant escaping a little bit the cultural codes of gender that made me self-conscious about my body and worry about my weight, because in the world of sports, athletes are all after the same things—speed, strength, endurance, technique, and winning. Pushing my physical limits, then, was a good experience for me; it helped me realize that I'm more competitive than I let myself admit, and it made me feel tough. Perhaps I would have discovered these things about myself in other ways, but it's hard to have any regrets.

I also know, however, that I didn't focus as much on my academics as I could have, and I didn't participate in other extra-curriculars because crew took up so much time. I sometimes wonder how much I've missed. When I quit rowing, I had a lot more time on my hands, and I could actually do all my work, which made the courses I took much more interesting. What other friends could I have made? What other interests could I have nurtured? Where would I be now if I'd taken a different path? As a faculty adviser now, I know that many student athletes pick courses based on their practice schedules, and I can't help but feel that they're short-changing their (very expensive) educations, despite whatever benefits they gain from sports. A lacrosse player was interested in taking a drawing class, but it met for 3 ½ hours in the afternoon, and he wasn't willing to be late for practice. Many of them eschew the smaller seminars offered in the afternoons, in favor of large lecture courses that meet earlier in the day. And although it's not nearly as pronounced here as it is at other places, I know that some students who were recruited for sports feel implicitly stigmatized, either by professors or other students, and often feel intimidated by the academic whizzes among them. And for still others, I can tell that they have a hard time imagining themselves apart from their sport, and they almost won't allow themselves to be interested in anything else. Sometimes I'm tempted to ask, “why don't you just quit?” but I sense that such a thing is unfathomable. Of course, there are also plenty of athletes who are academically successful and intellectually serious, so it's hard to generalize.

Others much more prominent than I, however, have generalized: William Bowen and Derek Bok, et. al., in books like Reclaiming the Game and Universities in the Marketplace, argue for the need to scale back the prominence of sports in college life, citing large scale studies that show the negative impact, on athletes as well as the rest of the campus community, of an overemphasis on sports and its commercialization, even at those places outside the big Div. I schools where athletes are not given sports scholarships or heavily recruited. It seems hard to disagree, but I feel that no amount of data will win the argument about the need for change without a clearer understanding of the emotional investments in sports and the idea of the athlete, and without a larger sea change in how our culture thinks about education and its values. And in that regard, the role of college sports seems akin to the role of the humanities (to beat that dead horse one more time), with the difference that, despite the dozens of books written about it, the public at large can't stop to question the former, and despite its defenders, can't ever seem to let go of its suspicion of the latter.

At this juncture, when I think about crew, I do think about its costs and the many things I didn't do because of it. But I also love it, in a way that's still difficult to explain.