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WITHIN THE FAMILY

Hooping It Up at Columbia

By Alex Sachare ’71

“Reviving the ROAR” was the lead headline in the February 10 issue of Spectator, the bold, block letters laid out over a photo of the Lerner Hall ramps filled with students who had attended a party called Glass House Rocks a week earlier. In the story, Class of 2007 president David Chait declares, “School spirit is back”; later in the story, party attendee Grace Parra ’06 enthuses, “All I can say is O-M-G. It’s like a whole different school.”

“The College is doing a much better job taking care of its students,” Matthew Harrison ’05, senior class president and a Glass House Rocks organizer, told Spectator. Harrison dislikes the term school spirit, saying it “sounds too rah rah rah. People here aren’t rah rah rah types.” But when asked whether it (whatever term you use for it) was on the rise, he said, “I think you have to say it is.”

Glass House Rocks was one example: a student-organized party that attracted more than 2,000 students to Lerner Hall on a Thursday night for games ranging from laser tag to Texas Hold ’Em, with campus dance groups providing entertainment. It comes on the heels of other moves by student leaders to boost school spirit in recent years, including successfully lobbying to eliminate fees for students to attend athletic events and creating Midnight Mania, a rally before the start of the basketball season. Student body presidents Michael Novielli ’03 and Miklos Vasarhelyi ’04 (both CCT class correspondents) were active in this regard and deserve credit for fueling an engine that continues to build momentum.

School spirit has been apparent in Levien Gym, where on the weekend following Glass House Rocks, students packed the house to cheer on the men’s basketball team — coached by the charismatic Joe Jones — not against Penn or Princeton, rivals that traditionally draw capacity crowds, but against Yale and Brown. Though the Lions lost both games, the excitement in the building was memorable.

All sports can build enthusiasm among students, but basketball has advantages worth noting. It’s a fast-paced, graceful game that’s easy to understand and that can be enjoyed and appreciated on many levels. Many of us have played it at some point in our lives, so at least to some extent we can relate to the players. Levien Gym provides an intimate setting that puts spectators in close proximity to the action, where players’ and coaches’ emotions are in full view. The fact that the gym is in the middle of the Morningside campus is another plus.

“The word is getting out about the basketball team and how much fun it is to go to games,” says Lillian Forsyth ’06 Barnard, one of the leaders of The 6th Man, a student fan club formed this year. The 6th Man joins Jews for Jones, a support group that popped up last season, in helping to keep fans excited.

The Lions recently were featured on the front page of The New York Times’ sports section, in a laudatory piece by columnist Ira Berkow headlined, “Columbia Coach Revives Winning Attitude.” And the enthusiastic Jones, who sends campus-wide phone messages to students urging them to support the team and passed out T-shirts near the Sundial to promote Midnight Mania, deserves credit for energizing the basketball program with his infectious passion and intensity.

It’s a far cry from two seasons ago, when Columbia was on its way to a 2–25 (0–14 Ivy) disaster that cost coach Armond Hill his job. But fans also need to be patient. After the Lions won six of their first seven games, their best start in 37 years (albeit against weak foes), at least one supporter started searching eBay for tickets to the NCAA Final Four. A dose of reality was administered by nationally ranked North Carolina State, which beat the Lions 84–74 in the Holiday Festival at Madison Square Garden, and a 77–47 thrashing at Cornell in the Lions’ first Ivy road game drove the message home that, while improved, Columbia was not yet ready to challenge for the Ivy crown.

As this is being written, the Lions are 12–9 but face four of their six remaining games on the road. They likely will finish around .500, perhaps a bit above breakeven overall and below that mark in the Ivies. But the key word is patience.

Give Jones another year or two to recruit players, give student enthusiasm and support for the program more time to build, and then let’s see what happens. It could be a lot of fun.

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