Scooter's Big College Weekend

Scooter Maxfield is 16. He’s a good kid—funny, normal, athletic. He plays soccer and runs track for Tenafly High across the Hudson, and he likes Kobe Bryant and the Lakers. He doesn’t have an obnoxious Jersey accent.

Scooter comes from a Columbia family—his brother Mark goes here, and so did his sister. She met her husband at Columbia, and Mr. Max teaches at the med school—meaning his kids get free tuition in CC and SEAS.

Scooter won his March Madness pool by picking Chapel Hill, and he even got to see the Tar Heels’ Sweet 16 win over Villanova in person, while visiting his sister at Syracuse. He had fun. Lots of fun.

So much fun, actually, that now he might not come to Columbia. I mentioned the free tuition, right?

“I wouldn’t sacrifice the education I’m getting for the sports, obviously—that’s the most important thing,” he says. “But if there are two schools that are somewhat similar in terms of education, now I’m thinking sports would be one of the final factors.”

It’s hard to argue with a 16-year-old who just saw a campus go nuts for NCAA tournament insanity. Scooter saw a doubleheader: Wisconsin beat his favorite player and team, Julius Hodge’s N.C. State, and the eventual champs downed ’Nova.

“We were in the upper deck, but even from there you could still see all the fans going crazy,” Scooter says. “They positioned everyone on opposite sides of the baseline—the cheering sections for each team, the pep squads and the bands, and then all the press, the guys dressed in the school colors. ... They were cheering like crazy, doing chants against each other—really getting into it, you know?”

Sounds great, Scooter.

“It’s incredible—they’re not that much older than you, when you think about it,” he says. “But you hear all about these guys on TV, and then you go to the game, and they’re right there in front of you.”

I was starting to wish I had a sister at Syracuse.

“Going up to visit her is always fun,” Scooter says. “All the college spirit, the sports atmosphere—especially the last time I went, when they played Notre Dame. There was a ton of Syracuse spirit everywhere for that one. Like I said, I play soccer and run track, and I just love all different spectator sports. It’s fun just being there in that atmosphere.”

I thought about a joke I once heard—that Columbia’s real color isn’t light blue, but black.

“If I were to go to Columbia,” he says in response to my hypothetical, “I could watch sports on TV, I guess.”

Scooter has that right—Columbia has some great TVs.

“Mark tells me about Columbia and the sports atmosphere, and I’ve visited a few times. It’s not necessarily bad,” he said, being polite. “Just different.” I asked him if he couldn’t just channel his enthusiasm into fencing and Joe Jones’ fledgling program in Levien.

“Oh, I’d definitely do that,” he says. (Like I said—good kid.)

“Because of my dad and my brother and sister, and because it’s close to home and stuff, I’ve always considered Columbia somewhere I really, really want to go. But after that weekend, it’s not necessarily like I wouldn’t go there, but some other ideas started to come up: Duke, places like that, that are also into sports. Columbia”—he paused—“it kinda made me feel like not wanting to go there as much as in the past.”

Scooter is not, in his words, a “crazy crazy crazy” sports fan—just average for an athlete, or slightly more so. “Sports atmosphere wouldn’t pull a school down from being my top choice,” he says. But like he said—given equivalent academics, sports just might be the tiebreaker.

Scooter’s only a sophomore, so there’s still time for the guys in Admissions to convince him otherwise. But they have their work cut out for them.

I asked Scooter how his dad felt about his newfound ambivalence, given Columbia’s tuition deal. “He says that’s something I should keep in mind when I’m deciding, but he’s being really supportive,” he says. “As long as I’m getting a good education, he just wants me to have fun.”

Wet Hot American appears on alternate Fridays. Send any comments to sports@columbiaspectator.com.