Emily Koller's article, published last week, "Where's the Rest of Your Team?" offers a brilliant analysis of one of Macalester's deepest and least understood problems. One part of this problem is Macalester's overall negative attitude towards competitive athletics and toward the students who participate in organized sports. The other part of the problem is the College's evident disinterest in the idea that physical "wellness" ought to be a distinctive part of our much-discussed "campus culture."

All winter I marveled that only six courageous athletes persisted despite one defeat after another to take the floor as Macalester's entire women's basketball team. I marveled even more that they played competitively, never gave up, and always made me feel proud of them, and of the College. Think about what they were up against: Their miniscule number meant that the starting team never could practice against a second team opposition, which requires five additional players. Everyone was forced to play a heavily excessive number of minutes. The team would collapse once players fouled out. Everyone had no choice but to play through injuries in order to keep the team on the floor. And when I learned from Emily's article that several of these extraordinary athletes now plan to fill out Macalester's woefully small women's softball team, I finally came to understand just how extraordinary their commitment really is.

But for all my admiration, it also became clear to me that the College has plainly failed these student-athletes by putting them in a position that guaranteed defeat, frustration and the embarrassment of having to answer the painfully obvious question, "where is the rest of your team?" This, to me, is inexcusable. Who allows such things to happen? Why do such admirable people end up in such a deplorable situation?

These questions lead to more basic questions. Why do so few of us, students, faculty and our most visible administrators, turn out to give vocal support to our varsity teams, Dean Laurie Hamre being the obvious administrative exception? Why are student-athletes who were denied admission to Macalester now competing against us on varsity teams for places like Carleton? Does the College harbor an unconscious bias against admitting academically qualified athletes? Why do so many of our varsity athletes feel so deeply that the rest of our campus marginalizes and ignores them? Why does a College with a 65-35 percent gender imbalance in favor of women nevertheless fail to attract a sufficient number of female athletes? On the other hand, what is it about Macalester that clearly makes it a less than attractive option for men—and therefore for male athletes? What, finally, does all this mean with respect to our justly prized ideals

of diversity and equality?

As these questions suggest, there's plenty of reason not to point fingers. All of us bear responsibility for this problem and all of us need to be involved in helping to solve it by addressing it frankly, making it a pressing campus priority and coming up with concrete improvements. I hope Emily Koller's article will provoke just such constructive action.

The most basic reason of all for our "athletics problem" is that Macalester places too little value on student's physical well-being, apart from emphasizing the perils of addiction, depression, negative self-image and unsafe sex. John Leaney, our extraordinarily successful soccer coach, described this problem perfectly when quoted in Emily Koller's article to the effect that our campus is over represented by smokers, under represented by joggers.

Having tracked Macalester's development for more than three decades, I conclude that there are not enough athletically-inclined people attending our College to insure a healthy mix of students with a broad range of interests and life-style preferences.

Unique circumstances, cultural forces and administrative decisions have combined to encourage a campus consensus that puts personal consumption over physical effort, that prefers Playstations to playing sports, and that (falsely) separates being intellectually "critical" from being a participant in athletics. This raises the most basic question we need to face. Is this truly the way we want Macalester to remain, or can we strike a new and more equitable balance that would be better for all of us?