Division 1 Sports and Your College Experience

[qtlaw]

In another thread I criticized Bama fans for crowding the streets after their win and stated that I went to a rather large university (over 20,000 on campus) but no D1 sports.

Did D1 sports really enhance your college experience and make you even fonder of your alma mater? Is it worth it?

I mean without that, I loved my college years, met great people, was academically challenged, got to study a huge breadth of subjects (engineering, economics, children's lit, Asian American studies, textiles and clothing, French and Mandarin.), enjoyed dancing and parties, met great people and made friends from different backgrounds.

Your thoughts?

 

[User 150927]

Yes, and I went to a mid major. Saturday's together at football game, sneaking booze in. Listen to the band and going uptown. Hockey games that often got raucous, basketball games with the occasional national upset. And plus I cut my teeth covering those sports. So yes 100% enhanced my college life.

 

[outofplace]

I thought it added to the experience, especially as someone writing for my college newspaper and doing some freelancing work. It was interesting to go back and forth between being the only media presence at some events to being part of a very large crowd that included national broadcasters for others.

 

[ChrisLong]

Hell, yeah. Went to USC for 2-1/2 years. Beat UCLA 3 times, beat Notre Dame 2 of 3 (both wins were epic), won 2 of 3 Rose Bowls. Won 2 national championships. Game day at the Coliseum was amazing. Basketball good, not great. Baseball won national championships every year. Writing for the school paper provided chances to get to know future pro stars and cover big games.
Had some interesting classes, especially photography.
I wish I had gone there for 4 years, but junior college was automatic since it was walking distance from home.

 

[Cosmo]

Hell yes, it did. It's really my only connection left to Virginia Tech other than talking to fellow alums who worked for the student paper. ****, we stormed the court for winning on a buzzer beater in the NIT. (Apologies if I nearly kicked Moddy in the head on the way down.) My engagement has dwindled over the years, especially with football, because I no longer really care to attend the games -- which is an all-day commitment from where I live. Also, covering my alma mater for a newspaper in 2012-13 really knocked my fandom down a notch. Just wasn't the same after that.

 

[swingline]

The Fifth Down was part of my college experience. And that Colorado ****er STILL isn't in the end zone.

 

[BrownScribe]

Heck yes! In fact, if you ask my parents, they'll say I picked my alma mater based on the football team rather than it being the best school for me. Granted, the team was coming off its most successful season in ions. Other universities had J-schools, but I still made the most of it. My alma mater's school paper was strong — and I got to learn on the fly. My only regret is I didn't take some business/marketing classes. It would've helped me in my post-journalism career more. Sadly, my alma mater's football team didn't really capitalize on that one season. My freshman year they had a losing season haha.

 

[maumann]

It depends, I guess.

Fresno State's broadcast school didn't even have a working radio station in 1976. You could "practice" in a studio and take a tape recorder to sports events, but there was no feedback. That didn't stop several people I know from making a career in the Valley, but that was sort of the idea: You'd land in Modesto, Merced, Visalia, Bakersfield and perhaps even move up to Fresno at some point. That wasn't my dream, so the school wasn't that great a fit for me.

With football and basketball now on campus, and the school quite a bit larger than 40 years ago, I'm guessing the facilities and faculty is also improved. But it's still ... Fresno.

On the other hand, Florida in 1976 had an on-campus AM Top 40 station (which was also the flagship of the football/basketball network), a 50,000-watt FM and a PBS TV station with weekday evening news, all positions paid and subject to interviews and management reviews. It was as close to "taking a test drive" in the industry as you could get.

But there were definite drawbacks to being at a huge state university. For example, the football and basketball radio gigs were staffed by professional full-timers, so in order to get realistic air checks, I had to do high school football PBP at a country AM station in Starke. And for baseball, we had six announcers on a rotation, with each of us getting one weekend road trip each.

Some of the people I worked with at UF went on to do well. Larry Vettel worked for Sunshine Network. Chuck Cooperstein has been with the Mavs for a long time. David Johnson has been evening anchor in Pittsburgh for three decades. Others went into station management (F---IN' SUITS!). David Lowe IV, who started a 10-watt radio station in his dorm room, went to law school and now sells luxury yachts as a hobby.

UF is even better now, in that it offers an actual sports broadcasting major. Maybe the classes hopefully teach you how to sell your own ads to make money!

The Gators were 0-10-1 in football and 3-24 in basketball during my senior year. It didn't make the experience any less valuable. It just prepared me for the Lions and the 2003 Tigers.

 

[RickStain]

I went to one of those super-fringe but technically Division I schools. There were some token attempts to get a real student section going because that's what a Real School would do, but it didn't draw much attention. We were too busy with the newspaper 95% of the time, but a couple of times my circle of friends managed to put together a road trip for an important game for our I-AA football team.

I think, in general, we are the wrong people to be decrying people's irrational attachment to sports teams that do not directly impact their lives. Without that emotional weirdness, sports journalism would not exist.

 

[DanOregon]

Going to games with friends in college, and having that continue to be a thread in a relationship that continues today is probably the main thing. Its harder to keep track of how the history department is doing - sure they'll send out a newsletter asking for donations and tell you how fabulous they are, but they won't tell you that their rankings have fallen in the toilet in the last couple of years.

 

[UNCGrad]

I mean, Duke/Carolina basketball...

 

[Spartan Squad]

I think San Jose State football has been more fun now that I am out of school. I think it's part school pride and part just being hipster in a market with the Niners, Stanford and Cal. When I went, they couldn't give tickets away. Do have a funny story of a buddy getting kicked out of a game, but I'll save that for another time.

In some places, without a real pro team to follow, football is everything. Was talking to a guy from Arkansas one night and one of his first questions was which college football team I follow. You don't ask that question in California. It's just different.

 

[MTM]

I greatly enjoyed my experience at a then DII school. I was at a suburban Cal State that was one of the top DII schools in the nation, winning national championships in numerous sports during my time there. Basketball was good but football was not. More students cheered for and attended games for USC and UCLA than the alma mater.

But, like others, I got opportunities that I wouldn't have had elsewhere. I created a sports talk show on the campus-located NPR station and while there was no live play-by-play, we would record games and edit them down to highlights. I was also able to cover many pro games and events, honing my craft although I switched from broadcast to print after graduation.

My wife went to an NAIA school in Oklahoma so were thrilled when our son picked a Pac-12 school. But he doesn't care about sports and attended maybe two football games in four years there and no other events, even though he had a high school friend on the volleyball team. He did smoke pot with the starting quarterback, if that counts for anything.

 

[Oggiedoggie]

This being at least nominally a sports journalism board, I’ll point out the obvious: Attending a D1 school greatly increased the opportunity to learn in a more-real environment than at a smaller school or one that didn’t have top-tier athletic program.

The football team at the university where I got my undergraduate degree sucked, but other teams in the conference brought a high level of skill and the intensity of game day helped me hone skills for being in the right place at the right time when everyone else covering the game was trying to do the same.

The basketball ball team was almost always a national contender and I was able to travel to cover the team postseason.

A wide variety of other sports and an active intramural athletic system also added variety to budding journalism career.

Perhaps the only downside is that, early on, I took the “No cheering in the press box!” mantra perhaps a bit too far and still don’t get very emotionally invested in the success of my alma mater’s teams.

 

[nietsroob17]

Coming out of high school, I wanted to stay in state and hoped to attend a Division I college -- applied to Georgia (knowing I wouldn't get in) and Georgia Southern (knowing I would get in). Being at Southern was a blast, because it still had a bit of the small school feel (enrollment was about 10-12,000 less than it is now, following the merger with Armstrong in Savannah).

I loved getting to cover and attend sporting events. When I started, Southern was at the tail end of its last great I-AA push with Paul Johnson and Adrian Peterson (the one who went on to the Bears), and my freshman year was the year of the last national title in 2000. On the sports beat at a college that size, you felt more appreciation for your work -- as opposed to being one of 50 people covering a Duke basketball game or a Georgia football game. For the major sports, it was typically us (the school paper), Statesboro and Savannah, with a steady flow of AJC coverage for football (mainly the late Earnest Reese, or Karen Rosen).

 

[micropolitan guy]

Being D1, even one of the smallest D1 teams, sure did enhance my college experience.

Football games were fun, but played about five miles away off-campus. I can only imagine how much fun it would have been had we played on-campus, like today, about 1/4 mile from my fraternity.

 

[Wenders]

Major D-1 university here. Attended almost every single football game all 4 years. 1 field storm.

Covered the men's basketball team my senior year. Nearly died in a court storm. One of the most iconic nights of my life. Covered the NCAA tournament and the first and second rounds.

Post college, I covered college basketball in my newspaper gig, so having "covered a D1 school and NCAA tournament" on my resume definitely helped get me that job.

 

[Driftwood]

I went to East Tennessee State. The football team beat Appalachian State for the first time in 20 or 25 years. The AD opened the gates to the field and was actively encouraging the students to go tear down a goalpost. Everyone was like, "Naaaaaa, we're good."

 

[playthrough]

Went to Indiana and never covered football or basketball yet I went on to be a scribe. Covered one year of men's soccer for an NCAA runner-up team, then was sports editor for the school paper. Got a late start on things, having been mostly a slug for the first two years. My original plan was to go into broadcasting, until the campus radio station had me do a soccer game. Soccer probably weeds out a lot of people who think they can be sports broadcasters.

The experience as a student fan was fantastic. Tailgating for football and staying for half the game (we were very mediocre), then terrific Bob Knight-era basketball. I have season basketball tickets now, mostly so I can let my kids experience it.

 

[Sam Mills 51]

One of the major perks of picking the school I did over the one I didn't was the one I picked had football. And I had significant years in marching band, auditioned and made it right away.

Made all games that didn't weather out the bands. Made a lot of basketball games after my first year ... shoot, the last two years of the ACC Tournament, I was my entire section because no one else in the section showed up for enough games. Sure, they wanted to go to the Duke and Chapel Hill men's games. But they didn't bother with the Florida State game ... and forget about women's games. Never mind that in those days, Kay Yow consistently won 20-plus games a season like clockwork whereas the men's team was crawling out the mess partly created by Jim Valvano and largely exacerbated by Peter Golenbock's lies and a publication run by a family that was unapologetically pro-Chapel Hill. Besides, the pep band could make a bigger difference in women's games, though they were better attended than many might think, especially there during that era.

As I told one editor before he was able to ask, it's tough to carry a piccolo in one hand and a notebook, scorebook and pencil in the other. No regrets because it was the time of my life. Also, as the son of a soccer and basketball official, I knew the difference between fans begging for calls and an actual missed call. Band tended to know I didn't gripe about stuff like that until I saw something unquestionably wrong.

Wouldn't do it any differently if I had the chance to do it again. I love sports and love music. It was the best of both worlds.