Any coach will tell you that students of all colors develop bonds that cross racial, ethnic and religious borders.
Should schools step up efforts to increase participation in intramurals?
From what I understand, participation in intramurals is painfully small at some schools.
So besides the obvious benefit of physical fitness, is this a way to close gaps, real or simply perceived?
Intramurals in my school don’t have coaches. Anyone who wants to show up from one day to the next is welcome to.
What problem are you attempting to address?
Racial and ethnic problems. Intramurals don’t need coaches. I was simply explaining that coaches do not see the same type of differences and distances between students.
So the question is, can expanded participation in sports help students develop better relationships?
It can be traditional sports, academic sports, bridge tournaments, anything to get students together that fosters teamwork.
They exist in many places but are a result of the existing social networks within the colleges. Some colleges have IMs set up around dorms or the greek system. Some are open and people form teams and register. Some, like Yale and Harvard have deep IM traditions and are extremely well funded and organized and are part of a year long competition between the residential colleges/houses akin to the rivalries at Hogwarts. Where schoolwide social tribes already exist (like Yale and Harvard), IMs foster great unity and pride and competition.
The fact is most other schools are “join if you can get a team” – which naturally only appeals to the most devoted cadre of sports enthusiasts. At Yale and Harvard, you may not play – but your college reputation is on the line so there’s fervent enthusiasm to win and compete well in IMs.
At other schools, the IM sports champion team gets some t-shirts and bragging rights with their boyfriends and girlfriends. IMs simply aren’t set up to be a unifying factor at many colleges. It’s a valid idea to explore however. It’s not cheap and colleges are tightening belts, however. Tell them to visit New Haven and Cambridge and get a sense of how vital they can be to the college spirit.
@T26E4 Yes I am well aware. The idea doesn’t need to be expensive depending on the type of sport. Poker, Bridge, Chess, things of this nature can also be an amazing way to at least take the edge off and get kids in a neutral, apolitical setting.
Residence vs Residence competition is also successfully employed at Notre Dame.
Right, ND is successful too. But what you speak about, ideally, transforms the landscape. Chess, poker — is akin to touch football or hoops— it appeals to a narrow band.
What H, Y and ND have becomes a focal point for huge swaths of the population beyond the actual players.
I think that any time you can get people to see others as PEOPLE, minus the “different from me” label, you go a long way in closing the gaps you discuss.
Would intramurals be one approach? Sure, if you can get a variety of kids to come out for them. Personally, they wouldn’t have been my cup of tea.
But any sort of activity that brings different people together, that lets them see the strengths and similarities of people they might otherwise not have come to know, should help bridge the gaps.
In my experience, teams are formed from already established groups so it’s not like people are meeting new people.
The poorer kids of color often don’t have time to join intramural teams. When they’re not in class or studying, they’re working. Sometimes more than one job. Intramural sports also seems to grow by word of mouth. If you don’t hang out with sports-oriented students, or live in student housing where you’re likely to see sign up sheets, you may not even hear about the teams or when they practice/play.
Another thing to keep in mind is not every student has an interest in participating in athletic activities while in school. This was the very factor in why several college classmates chose our LAC…because it wasn’t too sporty* and by the same vein…why athlete classmates complained about the lack of interest in sports participation/attending games among the vast majority of the student body when I attended. .
Also second the need to work part-time among lower SES students as well considering I was one such student at the time.
I think schools need to step up the effort to increase the dialogue between students of different races. Most of us will never know what it’s like to be followed around a store, stopped for DWB, or have someone call the police because you were ‘loitering’ in their neighborhood (when you actually live there.) It happens every day to your black class-mates and there is a rage that comes with the lack of recognition of how humiliating, frequent and frightening being viewed as a dangerous ‘other’ can be. Until those of us who are part of the majority can acknowledge the real damage that is being done to the minorities among us, there is little chance of real change. Intramural sports just isn’t going to cut it.
If you want to read a really powerful book, check out Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. A tough read but an important one.
True, and less than ideal.
I’ve had the experience of IMs making matters worse. I won’t go into details, but attending the IM finals between an all white and all black team still ranks among the scariest experiences of my life.
IMs only work when you can’t choose the team you belong to. They work at Harvard, Yale, Nortre Dame and other schools where you have to play for your integrated house, dorm, or residential college. They do not work when you get a group of “friends” together to play.Because…sadly…all too often the teams are segregated.
I think the OP is right though. The way to attack racism is to have students get to know each other. A study at Berkely years ago showed that the two least bigoted groups on campus were varsity athletes and musicians who belonged to the symphony orchestra. They had leaned to work together.
Sports promote racial understanding when the teams are integrated. The unfortunate reality is that when students choose their own teams they often aren’t.
So- this is college, not HS. I’m used to the term intramurals referring to athletics. There are so many different other extracurricular activities that can get students together in a nonacademic situation. Many students do not want to spend their free time doing sports in any organized fashion. Many do not have the time as well.
Short answer- NO.
When I was a grad student, I played coed intramural softball. We played (ahem-- we consistently lost) against undergraduate teams. We were terrible, but it was a blast! 
DH played on a softball team made up of French, Italian and Spanish literature graduate students and faculty. They called themselves the Romance Phillies (as in philology, not Phiistines, lol.) As an undergrad, DH was a Division 1 athlete at one of the best schools in the country for his sport - so he was athletic. But he was also the exception, on that team. The best part was going for beer after the game. They analyzed their inevitable loss in the various foreign languages. Nerds.
After a loss we always went out for consolation chicken wings and pitchers of cheap beer. We did a lot of chicken wings and cheap beer that season.
It would be no difference at a college than at an integrated high school - the different groups still sit together at lunch by race, ethnic groups, religions. The difference races may play on the same team, enjoy the same activities, but when those are over, the participates head back to their original groups.
My daughter goes to a very diverse school with 1/3 of the students from other countries. When you look around you see a lot of diversity, students of all races working in labs,playing on athletic teams. After hours, you see international students heading to the international dorm, groups of black students hanging out together, groups of Chinese students heading to dinner together and speaking Chinese. No one is unhappy with this, but it is not quite as integrated as the numbers would have you believe. Academically, yes, but socially, no.
Our high school was theoretically integrated too, with no majority race or economic class. But the tendency was to hang out with kids like you. My younger son had a much more integrated group of friends than his older brother, partly because he hung out with the music kids. He played in two orchestras, and his best friend had a rock band whose leader singer was black and lead guitarist was Indian-American.
Thanks to him I heard a lot of stories about how differently he was treated by the local police depending on just which friends he was hanging out with.
I am not a fan of affinity housing, though I do understand its attraction. I went to an all-girls high school and I know just what the positives of that kind of segregation are.
However, the success of IM sports in the context of H, Y, and ND are likely the result of characteristics that are not present at the majority of colleges. At these schools, a high percentage of students live on campus all four years, so organizing IM competitions by residence can have the desired effect. Where most students live off campus or commute from their parents’ houses, IM teams may not be mainly by randomly assigned on-campus residence, but may form due to other social networks (including off-campus residence like fraternities and sororities) which may be more segregated (indeed, sororities are often much more highly segregated than the campuses that they are associated with, and fraternities are only slightly better than sororities in many cases).
In addition, H and Y have extra-good financial aid for the few lower SES students whom they do admit, so that even those from lower SES backgrounds may not have as high work hours as they would at most other colleges. So such students may be less excluded from IM sports due to work hour commitments compared to those at most other colleges.