Experiences on the Crew Team
Sharon Dauson
There are 38,000 undergraduate students at Penn State. The school fields 27 varsity teams. (I choose Penn State as the example only because I am from Pittsburgh and most of my high school friends are Nittany Lions.) Dartmouth, by contrast, has a student body of roughly 4,000, and supports 31 varsity teams. In 2007, Penn State set a record by selling out the entire student section of the football stadium (22,000 tickets) within 59 minutes of tickets becoming available. The Nittany Lions average over 100,000 fans per home game. I don’t have statistics on Dartmouth football attendance, but I am fairly certain student tickets are free and that there are more people on Collis porch than at Memorial Stadium on any given Saturday. My point is not to argue that Dartmouth students are awful fans or to complain about the football team. Rather, I think this illustrates that the purpose of athletics at Dartmouth, and in the Ivy League in general, is drastically different than that of other Division I schools across the nation.
