Induction Weekend a Success

For the first weekend in my four years at Columbia, the stars aligned for Columbia Athletics. Things went so perfectly that even the contestant Saturday night in the usual STA Travel shooting contest missed every short-range attempt but banked in a half court buzzer-beater.

The Athletics Department, which for so long had been promoting its Hall of Fame Inauguration, executed not only a near flawless dinner, but did it on one of the most notorious basketball weekends of the season.

Normally when the department tries to peg big events to Penn and Princeton, I would argue that it is lunacy. In fact, if I had written this column last Friday, I probably would have made the case then. Columbia basketball was being dominated by the league and stood virtually no chance even coming close to winning if it played like it had during its 1-7 conference stretch.

Somehow, instead of posting two expected losses, the team posted two shocking victories. All of a sudden, Columbia not only had a dinner to celebrate its athletic heritage, but two enthralling and critical victories to back it up. Wow.

Simply put, this was a home-run weekend for a department trying to show it is taking steps to shed almost four decades of futility.

"Anytime you beat Penn and Princeton at home ... it's a great weekend," Athletic Director M. Dianne Murphy said. "I was happy that not only was our team successful but also that our alumni who came back could see our team play really well."

The alumni who saw or even were close to both games were in for a treat. The Lions did not handle the Killer P's, but more excitingly, shocked both of them on game-winning field goals-one a buzzer-beating tip-in and the other a jumper with ten seconds left. A team that couldn't seem to muster enough energy to finish halftime leads against Cornell, Brown, and Harvard with victories found enough adrenaline to compete for 80 minutes against the perennial powers in the conference.

As a guest of the department at the dinner, I saw the Hall of Fame as a step towards celebrating a tradition that few students, or even recent alumni, know about in Columbia athletics. Murphy and her staff did an excellent job brushing the cobwebs off this history and have begun to weave their own tale of sports at Morningside. But, as I have often thought, these attempts mean very little without the wins to back them up.

Dinner guests were shown videos that contained great footage of the honorees while they were at Columbia. The footage kindled a sense of pride about Columbia's athletics tradition in me, to which I had grown quite numb covering the Lions for Spectator. This sensation was certainly fueled by the excitement already generated by the basketball team's win over Penn, but for a few hours, I saw a bright future ahead for Columbia athletics.

On Sunday, Murphy's assessment was candidly positive, and I would agree.

"I want to give us an A-plus," she said. "Surely I always think you can do things better, but I think we were pretty much right on the money. It was a very special event. There was a great deal of detail and planning that went into the event. We branded the event in a very tasteful way. For the first time, I think it was a huge success."

One of the most important aspects of the dinner was the way it brought former athletes back to the University. While it was independent of basketball, the dinner was sweetened by the sweep.

"Obviously there are going to be other benefits from that when you bring people back on campus and maybe they haven't been back on campus for a long time," Murphy said after making clear the purpose of the dinner was to honor Columbia's athletic traditions.

"And that was the case with some of our recipients this weekend, our inductees this weekend-they haven't been back on campus in a long time. It's so easy to get disconnected when you leave, and what's really special is when people can come back together and it's like they never left each other."

In a single weekend, Murphy may have confirmed in alumni that she is taking steps to revitalize the department and change its role within the University. But ultimately what validated that effort was the men's basketball team's two wins.

With Columbia's struggles the past four decades, few initiatives will survive without some wins to back them up. This weekend was an example of a brilliant initiative and the power winning has to enhance it.

The next, even more critical step, is consistency.

As Murphy said: "It was a great weekend for Columbia University, not just for Columbia athletics, but for Columbia University... hopefully we can have more of those."