Athletics, school spirit

runnersmom
Mon, 16 Jan 2006 10:22:17 +0000

I have a freshman S at WUSTL, and I’d have to say that there is a definite lack of school spirit based on athletics. There seems to be an enormous amount of school spirit if you define that as enthusiasm for the school, a belief that there is no better place to be and general excitement about being a WUSTL student, but it is definitely NOT based on the athletic teams. There is a group called Red Alert (I think) that tries to engender support for the teams and goes so far as to offer free food and t-shirts to get people to attend games etc. S tells me that such “promises” do in fact get kids out to games, but it is not an athletic rah-rah school in the mold of the big athletic conferences or even the small LAC’s that have a lot of built-in rivalries in their geograohic area (think Williams/Amherst etc.). Remember, WUSTL’s athletic conference is the UAA which includes UChicago, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, Brandeis, URochester amongst others. It’s pretty spread out and doesn’t make for natural rivalries…except in our house since we have S1 at UChicgo and S2 at WUSTL!