Football seniors search for new identities

When the clock expires at around 3:45 p.m. Saturday, you’re going to find 25 guys standing around at Baker Field looking forward to a hot shower and a whole lot of soul-searching.

While senior year is not yet halfway over for these individuals, their collegiate athletic careers have ended, without pomp and circumstance or league championships. After tomorrow, the Columbia Athletics Web site will remove their names. Their former teammates will all move up a year, so juniors will be listed as seniors, and seniors will be listed as… nonexistent.

It isn’t the win-loss record that matters after tomorrow. It’s the experience of living and breathing as a collegiate athlete for these 25 guys (and Lou, too, after wrestling season is over). After tomorrow, their license to tromp around Columbia in team-issue sweats slowly starts to evaporate. They’ll all have the same penance of a few weeks’ rest after the end of the season, but when spring conditioning time rolls around, these 25 guys won’t join their former comrades in the “optional” team lifts and runs anymore. They are no longer collegiate athletes.

It wouldn’t be sincere to say that they aren’t athletes anymore. Athleticism refers to abilities, not the context of those abilities. But there’s still a lingering issue—will these athletes compete in anything ever again? A game of pickup basketball? Touch football? I play Wiffle Ball with the Spec crew on occasion, but I am no athlete. There’s certainly a distinction between defining athletes as those people who play sports regularly and competitively and those who do not. So then the notion of being an athlete must be associated with those who are currently competing in an organized way, and those who are not must be resigned to that former self.

It’s growing pains on a whole new level. When we were all freshmen in college, there was a bit of an identity crisis for all of us. By virtue of being overachievers, we identified ourselves by “doing.” I did theater and choir and debate and DECA and baby-sat—that was me. Upon coming to college, all of that prior high school context was removed. We each had to find a new context in which to “do” something so that we could define our own identities.

Athletes got to continue doing. They continued playing sports, doing something that they knew and loved and were good at, and eased their way into college life with a group of other players with whom they formed a bond and an instant association.

But for some athletes, they haven’t been “doing” over the past four years. They are “being.” Participating in athletics is not just one of the 17 extracurriculars they listed on their college application. Playing sports is not a choice—it’s an irremovable part of their being. It’s why they get up early for morning runs, stay awake until 3 a.m. studying the playbook, and take feedback that would qualify as verbal abuse without the blink of an eye. It is as if they don’t know how to “be” anything else. Yet every single athlete at Columbia will now experience a moment when their jerseys have been returned and their lockers have been emptied. They will have added the last number they will ever add to the programs’ histories.

Luckily for them, athletes have been able to postpone this full reckoning with self until slightly later in school. Not so luckily, this identity crisis could become prolonged into one behemoth senior-year meltdown. We seniors are on the verge of another identity crossroads. Now that we’ve finally established ourselves, however we chose within the Columbia community context, there’s another grand adventure on the horizon: graduation. It’s time for us to start to be something different all over again.

If you look it up, identity is defined as character, not as a laundry list of accomplishments. The omniscient English language already has the answer to our identity crisis problem, hiding in plain sight. All it will take for a smooth transition from athlete to impassioned spectator is recognition of the values and virtues that athletic participation has fostered in each former player. By this point, athletes have developed the time-efficiency skills that are so coveted in the workplace today that they’ll blow employers out of the water. Their dedication and loyalty and willingness to be up at all hours of day and night won’t go overlooked. They just have to channel those talents into a new arena.

I don’t know that the people who compiled Webster’s are the be-all, end-all of esteem psychology. But when it comes to self-definition, you’ve got to start somewhere.

Lisa Lewis is a Barnard College senior majoring in economics.

sports@columbiaspectator.com