​The craziest 'Crazie' shouldn’t need a bribe

Last week, Countdown to Craziness showcased our men’s basketball team with the same bright lights and hype music used every year to get fans ready for the upcoming season. This year, besides highlighting our team and its new first-year members, we believe it also gave us a glimpse into the exact character of our student body’s enthusiasm for sports. Namely, our spirit is hardly school spirit and we suffer huge deficiencies in supporting women’s sports and sports that are not basketball and, occasionally, football.

We start with a pinning down of the distribution of the typical Duke student’s school spirit. Students will go to great lengths through tenting, lining up and sleeping out to attend basketball games each year, the UNC game in particular of course, but show no such competition or enthusiasm for other sports despite teams like women’s golf and men’s lacrosse being wildly successful. If we truly value excellence, we should acknowledge where we are simply moving with the crowd on sports. But further on the UNC game, most other colleges will have large crowds turn out for any and all games against their rivals, yet at Duke we have typical or marginally higher attendance at the recent women’s soccer game against UNC, Duke’s first win against our rivals in that sport in a decade. Outside of match-ups with the Tar Heels, our big regular season games fail to be acknowledged as such. An important and arguably our most exciting home game against Georgia Tech was a victory, but a bittersweet one. Student attendance was lackluster in spite of the renewed tailgate and hype for football going into this year.

That said, it is hard to compare Duke to schools like Ohio State University or the University of Florida given the sheer difference in undergraduate student body size. But even still, if we compare ourselves to Stanford with its comparable number of students, it seems it would go down as a loss for our attendance record. Given our size and academic rigor, it might be excusable for students to place their energy just into events that relate to men’s basketball, but that seems hardly a good excuse given the length of the basketball season and the opportunities to support other sports like fencing, tennis and swimming and diving.

An even more striking neglect for Blue Devil athletes as a whole is that of women’s sports. At Countdown this year, the women’s basketball coach, Joanne P. McCallie, introduced this year’s women’s line-up and concluded by offering $1,000 in cash to the fan who came in the most spirited attire to Duke's Nov. 22 game against Army. While hopefully making a difference in attendance for that game, the solution is hardly long-term for the women’s sport. More broadly, sports at collegiate and professional levels alike are dominated by a testosterone-driven culture of strength and competitive comparison. Too many soccer fans are really only men’s national soccer team fans unless the women are on the cusp of victory.

We should not demean but understand the differences between sports to appreciate the differences in strategy and training that teams work tirelessly at. Women’s sports should not be feminized or seen as any less tactical than men’s sports. Particularly in fencing, swimming and golf, love of the sport should easily ignore gender lines. Even women’s basketball games which are remarked upon as 40 minutes of layups should not be put down for how the sport is played but watch and enjoyed for its nuances and differences from the men’s sports. Coach McCallie’s offer to students is at once a call to students for support and an example of how dangerous it is to let support for our sports narrow and concentrate. Reward excellence for excellence’s sake and support all of our athletes for their hard work and achievement, past, present and future.