Columbia athletics set to take a turn for the better?

“All Columbia sports stink.”

It’s a phrase that I have heard too often on campus during my three years at Columbia, and it’s time we put this notion to bed.
I’ve heard variations of this as well as students attempt to make excuses for their lack of interest in Columbia sports.

“I would follow the teams if they were good.”

Let the record show that as of 2009, Columbia sports don’t stink.

Now, I won’t go so far as to say that the Lions are on the verge of pulling the 2007 Florida Gators feat of winning national titles in both basketball and football in the same academic year. Overall the programs still have room to grow and improve, but make no mistake about it, they are improving.
Look specifically at the fall sports teams, which wrapped up their seasons over the past few weekends. While this is not a complete picture, the results do give an indication of a general trend for Columbia sports.

Even in recent history, there were a select few teams at Columbia which consistently approached greatness in the Ivy League. The women’s soccer team had five straight winning seasons, which culminated with an Ivy title in 2006. The men’s tennis team has won at least a share of the title four times since 2000. The women’s cross country team won four straight heptagonal championships from 2002 to 2005, and the men’s and women’s programs as a whole boast enough individual accolades to fill up the rest of this column.

These programs have been the peak for Columbia, and this season, they have not disappointed. The men’s cross country team won the 2009 Heptagonal Championships and the women’s team placed third. The men’s tennis team, which plays individual tournaments in the fall and dual matches (including Ivy matches) in the spring, had another successful fall season, placing a semifinalist in the 128-player field at the Wilson/ITA Regional Championships. Not to mention the fact that senior No. 78 Mihai Nichifor beat the No. 17 player in the nation in three tight sets.

In addition to these teams, most of the other fall sports are improving rapidly.

The women’s tennis team landed the No. 7 recruiting class in the nation this year, and the impact has already shown. Freshman Nicole Bartnik, the No. 5 junior in the nation last year, was undefeated against every player in the northeast this year and reached the finals. She won in her first two collegiate tournaments and was entered as the top overall seed in the Wilson/ITA Regional Championships before she was forced to pull out with the flu. For a program that has never finished above 3-4 in conference play since it began in 1985, this is clearly a step in the right direction.

The men’s soccer team has also shown improvement over the past few seasons, although a tie for last place in the Ivy League is not what new head coach Kevin Anderson had in mind. Having gone winless in conference as recently as 2007, the Lions have proved recently to be a tough match for strong teams, as they have beaten three top-20 teams in the past two seasons. The women’s soccer team, which had a down season this year finishing tied for fifth, won its first ever Ivy title in 2006, and Kevin McCarthy has led his squad to a .500 mark or better in each of his six seasons as head coach.

The field hockey team finished 9-8 this fall, its third consecutive winning season, while the volleyball team won 12 games for its most wins since 2001 and its best Ivy finish since 2002. If you haven’t noticed, new head coach Jon Wilson has already turned around a program that only had one above-.500 finish in conference play, in 2001, and won one Ivy game from 2006 to 2008. In addition to an improvement in win total, Megan Gaughn was the only freshman to be named to second-team all-Ivy for her outstanding fall campaign.

Then there is football, which, along with basketball, tends to be the most popular sport on college campuses and the source for the most school pride. Here at Columbia, many students choose to simply ignore the football team, assuming incorrectly that the program’s 44-game losing streak between 1983 and 1988 is somehow still continuing today.

It’s not.

Like it or not, the football team has shown improvement under head coach Norries Wilson, highlighted by this season’s fourth-place finish, the program’s best conference finish since 1996, although they also finished tied for fourth in 2001. In fact, the Lions have shown remarkable improvement in just the three years that I have seen them. In their 2007 homecoming match against a Penn team that ended up finishing tied for fourth, Columbia was blown out 59-28 after the Lions found themselves down 45-7 at halftime. This year, in a rematch against eventual Ivy champion Penn, the Lions hung tough for three quarters before falling 27-13. In addition to the bottom line, wins and losses, Wilson has succeeded in bringing talent to Morningside Heights, something not many of his predecessors can say. Players such as Austin Knowlin, Alex Gross, and Lou Miller have made the football team exciting to watch, as anyone who has seen it can attest.

There is one caveat to this entire discussion. The key word throughout is improvement. Many of the sports mentioned above are improving, and getting better year after year, but few have achieved excellence consistently. Finishing in fourth place, or sixth place, or finishing above .500, are not end goals—these are stepping stones to a larger goal of consistently challenging for championships. That’s what all the athletic programs here at Columbia are striving for, excellence in both the Ivy League and to some degree on the national level. The teams have begun this process, taking clear and distinct steps in the right direction. It’s up to the rest of us to acknowledge this and begin to get on board.

Kunal Gupta is a junior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science majoring in operations research.
sports@columbiaspectator.com