Columbia Gym Home to Fans and Memories

As a men’s basketball writer for the Spectator, I have had the opportunity to travel all over New England to see Columbia play other Ivy League schools on the hardwood.

For almost two full seasons, I have gone wherever the team has gone. I have driven hundreds of miles up and down the East Coast and stayed overnight on countless sofas and futons. I have probably had more McDonalds’ meals in the last two years than in the other 20 years of my life combined.

But, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Not only do I love getting out of the city for a few days and being able to drive a car (something I don’t normally do during the academic year), but I love watching Ivy League basketball.

OK, some of you reading this right now are thinking that as far as college basketball goes, the Ivy League is probably the least exciting conference to follow. The games tend to be low scoring. There are almost never superstar athletes with big time NBA buzz. If you see one slam dunk in a game, you are considered very lucky and you are told that you may never see it again. No team has a realistic hope of winning a national championship, let alone advancing past the second round of the tournament, so the teams are only really playing for a league title.

While I agree that there might be less athleticism in Ivy games than in the rest of the NCAA and that there are fewer spectacular plays that bring you to your feet in the Ancient Eight than there are, say, in the ACC, I really find Ivy League games exciting.

Maybe because there is such an intense academic rivalry between the various schools in the conference the games take on a larger meaning. A win over Princeton, for example, is not just a win but a matter of school pride. Whatever the reason, I am completely hooked. I cannot get enough of Ivy League basketball.

And there is no place where I get more excited about Ivy League basketball than when I watch Columbia play in Levien Gymnasium. Of course, as a Columbia student and sports fan, I am biased. I would rather see the Light Blue play at home than anywhere else. But at the same time, I really think that the energy at a Levien game is greater than at any other basketball arena in the league.

I don’t mean to suggest that Levien is the best facility in the Ivies. It’s definitely not. The Palestra, where the Penn team plays, is the largest and without question the nicest arena in the league. It rivals places like Duke’s Cameron Indoor in terms of its sheer size and beauty. A multi-leveled behemoth of an arena that seats almost 9,000, the Palestra is essentially a museum, an unofficial hall of fame to Ivy League basketball. You walk along the perimeter of the arena and you pass by gallery after gallery of old photographs honoring the best players and teams to pass through the conference in the last century.

The Palestra is aesthetic, and Levien is not. Levien is a dinky little gymnasium with bleachers that pull out from the walls and a very low ceiling that has the tendency to give you claustrophobia even if you are not claustrophobic. While there are championship banners hanging from the rafters at the Palestra and plaques lining the walls of the entranceway honoring past teams, Levien has no such banners or plaques.

Even so, when students come to games at Levien the place becomes the loudest, most lively arena in the league. Sound is amplified in Levien like nowhere else in the Ancient Eight, so that a packed gymnasium feels like a place holding 10,000, rather than 3,400. Additionally, because the seating is so near the floor, every seat in the house is a good seat and everyone feels as if they are seeing the game up close.

No other gym in the Ivy League comes close to replicating the atmosphere of excitement and intimacy that one experiences at Levien. Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium, which seats 6,800, certainly overwhelms Levien in its size, and when it fills up the crowd can get boisterous. But, it’s not the same. You are not elbow to elbow with the person sitting next to you at Jadwin as you are at Levien, so you don’t feel the energy of your neighbors as much.

Cornell and Harvard have nice basketball arenas, but they also don’t hold a candle to Levien in terms of how electrifying their atmosphere is. Cornell’s Newman Arena, which has a capacity of 4,473, is intimidating from outside, but once you take your seat inside you realize that it’s not intimidating at all. For all of its towering height and extremely vertical seating, it is very quiet. You could hear a quarter drop in the nosebleed section from the floor. Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion, which seats a maximum of 2,200, is actually very similar to Levien in design, with two sets of bleacher-style seating on opposite ends of the court. But, like Newman, Lavietes does not generate the kind of noise that Levien does.

One reason why Levien is so special is that students actually come to basketball games in large numbers, and, even when the Lions are losing, they get into the game. With the exception of Penn and Princeton, I think that Columbia has had the best average turnout this season of any other arena in the Ivies. And when people come to games at Levien, they don’t just sit quietly and give the occasional cheer. They get crazy.