DP Sports: Seeing it from both ends of the spectrum

As a student journalist, I've written hundreds of column inches on subjects ranging from women's gymnastics to NCAA basketball tournament seedings. As a college soccer player and prototypical benchwarmer I've also logged countless minutes on benches from North Carolina to Boston. These two disparate experiences have contributed many of my fondest memories of college and given me the opportunity to meet some truly incredible individuals. For example, as a goalie, I've been fortunate enough to train with Bob Rigby, the goalie coach for the men's and women's soccer programs. As a professional soccer player in the '70s, Rigby starred for both the U.S. National Team and played with Pele on the New York Cosmos. To this day, he remains the only soccer player ever to featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Through journalism, I've gotten the opportunity to interview and observe scores of amazing athletes and coaches like Fran Dunphy and others. Without question, having spent so much time writing about sports added context to my athletic experience, allowing me to appreciate just being on a team despite seeing action so sporadically. It was actually quite ironic when during this soccer season, the writer covering the men's soccer team twice mis-reported the facts of my role in games against Cornell and St. Joseph's. For the first time, I had to personally deal with the annoyance of being incorrectly misrepresented in print. Having defended slip-shod writing which has appeared on the sports page of the DP, I found the shoe to be on the other foot. However, being on the receiving end of one DP Sports' notorious blunders in reporting didn't make me feel any different about the paper. The fact of the matter is that just as athletes are imperfect and have off days, so too are DP Sports writers and editors. Yes, DP Sports writers are journalists, but let's be honest, they're by no means professionals and do not portray themselves as such. Just as an athlete spends hours developing his conditioning and mastering the fundamentals of his sport, commitment which fans at a game will never see, DP staffers are a remarkably committed bunch as well. Athletes chafe at the DP's coverage when it is either factually incorrect or they perceive it to be overly critical, as evidenced by reaction to Miles Cohen's column on Jamie Lyren this year. Though I don't believe adding the prefix student to journalism is an excuse for poor reporting, I do feel DP Sports writers get too hard a rap for their miscues given how much they contribute to the Penn athletic program. The DP Sports writer is the best friend an athlete here can have. Writers commitment to their beats helps athletes stand out from the crowd at a school where students have to be pretty special just to gain admission. Sure, as an athlete, it bothers me when I read an article highlighting a less-than-stellar performance by a Penn athlete, because I know how dedicated Quakers athletes are to their respective sports. The attention an athlete gets in the pages of the DP through game coverage and features frequently far outweighs what he gets from fans, whose attendance is often sparse, whether the sport be fencing or football. Having transferred to Penn from a school where most athletes are on scholarship, I understand the immense sacrifice athletes make when choosing to enter Penn's non-scholarship athletic program. I enjoyed playing a sport at Penn largely because of the mystique being an Ivy League student-athlete, a quality which I suppose attracts many top notch recruits to chose Penn over schools with strong academic reputations which do offer athletic scholarships like Stanford, Georgetown and Boston College. No one organization on campus, including the Athletic Department, purveys the mystique with more fervor than the DP sports section, which probably has something to do with how it earned its nickname: DPOSTM (The Daily Pennsylvanian's Only Staff That Matters.)

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.