Smells Like Team Spirit

“I went to the game against Cooper Union way back when. I was there for the victory. I was there cheering from the sidelines in the freezing cold,” said Maggie Cavaliere, a first year Parsons student. “I lost my voice after they won and we all stormed the field like it was some sort of cup game and it was amazing.”

Cavaliere recently joined The New School soccer program after previously being a fan of the team. As a freshman, she came to The New School not expecting to continue her sports career. In fact, she had joined an intramural soccer league at a local gym before finding out about the team at The New School, which began playing games in the fall of 2013.

“I thought, I love soccer and I love the New School, so I should definitely get involved,” she told the Free Press.

This story may feel out of place at The New School, a university more regarded for its lack of sports than sports themselves. In 2009, The New School held the title of “The Worst Sports School In America” according to the Princeton Review. The sports world chuckled, because, to them, The New School had received an equivalent of a Darwin Award.

ESPN hopped on board and did a full piece on athletics at The New School in 2009, but what they found surprised them. Instead of finding a wasteland of athleticism amongst a thespian paradise, reporter Kieran Darcy saw several athletic programs with character. That article was written five years ago, and much has changed since.

Dodgeball tournaments, which at that point existed only in the visions of former Athletic Director Michael McQuarrie,  are now a fully fledged event. The New School currently has multiple intramural sports teams, including basketball, cross-country and cycling. A tennis team and ultimate frisbee team are also in the works.

“I wish it had come sooner. I think a tennis team forming now not only makes sense and is appealing to the existing New School community, it’s a classic, fun and engaging sport to have available for the incoming classes,” said Mikey Luken, a senior at Lang.

The athletic department recently issued out a questionnaire to gauge student interest in a tennis program. The response was overwhelming, with over seventy students responding in the first few days, compared to the expected fifteen.

According to current Director of Athletics Diane Yee, the main issue with getting these programs off the ground is space. However, she told the Free Press that student interest is certainly there.

“I think it comes from the students first and foremost,” Yee said, “Every one of our intercollegiate sports has come from student drive and interest.”

“The program has had its share of difficulties,” Yee said about a lack of space to house the events and games.

“The main thing that’s holding us back right now is the availability of facilities,” she said.

The New School currently has one gym on Fifth Avenue, but a new room is expected to open in the basement of the University Center next year. There are no practice rooms for the teams.

“I know that we are strapped for space because of our location in Manhattan,” said Javi Carpenter, coach of The New School soccer team and current grad student. “But even something as simple as a gym with weights [would help]. Something where you can go as a team and work out.”

The Athletic department currently rents gym space for the teams, but all games have to be played in “away” locations. For example, games against other New York City colleges are played in local gyms and games against schools outside of the city are played in their facilities.

Regardless of the space issue, Yee has no doubt that the program is growing in size.

“I take careful statistics on the attendance numbers,” she said. “There are about 250 students in fitness classes and about 100 in intramural sports.”

Yee said that the number of students interested in sports is not necessarily increasing, but that the interest has always been there.

“Most of the soccer team is actually made up of international students who go to Parsons,” Carpenter said. “They came here with an interest in fashion and kinda gave up on soccer. They came from Japan or Korea or Europe and they came with an interest in fashion to one of the most fashion forward corners of the world. When you draw this international crowd you draw an interest in soccer and that’s why so many members of the team are international.”

According to Yee, multiple students interested in the tennis team were formerly United States Tennis Association (USTA) certified, meaning that they were nationally ranked in tennis. This trend shows that the interest in sports hides beneath the surface of The New School student body. Now that more programs are being added, more interest is being shown.

Nearby college, Sarah Lawrence, is currently undergoing the process of becoming a fully-fledged NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Division III school. The process involves having six competitive sports for each gender, a rigorous application process and joining a college conference.

“Will we change our culture because of athletics?” Stephanie Browner, Dean of Eugene Lang asked. “I don’t think so. I think if we follow the student lead, we will be fine.”

Both Yee and Browner agree that The New School’s small athletic program may discourage certain prospective students, but Browner does not see this as a problem. “You can’t be all things to all people,” she said.

As an independent sports school, The New School makes its own schedule and choose where, when and who to play. The one issue with this is that it becomes very difficult to compete with higher-level schools that compete in NCAA conferences.

“It’s always going to look smaller and in some ways less than NCAA sports,” Browner said. “But it might be more of a tribute to who we are.”

“It started with just me and my group of friends,” Ashim Jashi, one of the founding members of the soccer team and a member of the basketball team said. “The school helped us out a lot. We got funding from them, we sent out surveys and discovered that there was a lot of interest in a soccer team.”

From the perspective of a dual sport athlete at The New School, Joshi has experience with joining an established sport at the university as well as starting one.

“It’s very student driven, and though we get help from the athletic department, we have to help ourselves,” Joshi said. “We are not guaranteed a practice field, so when we go down to Chelsea Piers for practice, we might not have a field available to us so we might have to wait a while.”

Carpenter, Jashi’s soccer coach, thinks that there are benefits to crafting a sports team from scratch.

“Because we aren’t an established team we can make our own culture,” Carpenter said, “We have full creative license on what the team does and we’re all very passionate.”

With reporting by Max Resetar