I have always wanted to know why some Tufts students walk around campus carrying a gallon of Poland Spring water. Do they stockpile gallons, or refill them? Aren’t they bulky and cumbersome? Yet, tracking down an answer was easier said than done. From the gear and uniforms, it’s obvious that these gallons are accessories sported by players on a men’s athletics team. However, none of my own close friends are on any of Tufts’ Division III teams, nor do I have any solid mutual connections to anyone on the men’s football or lacrosse teams, who I suspected to be the gallon-users.
Do athletes and non-athletes really occupy such different worlds at Tufts? Senior Jessie Ku claims we do. As someone involved in the arts, Ku doesn’t encounter any athletes on a day-to-day basis and suspects a huge social division exists.
“I feel like athletes are very secluded in their own bubble and their own friend group,” Ku said. “Because of different interests and not a lot of overlapping time together, it just so happens to be that I don’t really have any athlete friends.”
Student-athletes have a unique commitment at Tufts, typically spending 10–15 hours a week training together during their game season, on top of more time spent commuting to and participating in competitions. The athletes I spoke to all agreed that having the same practice routine bleeds into similar meal times, class schedules and social opportunities.
They’ve been herding together for years, long before they arrived at Tufts. Senior swimmer Brian Uribe explained that as a Division III student-athlete, your sport has been a large part of your life for a long time.
“For us, it is part of our identity to be an athlete or be a swimmer,” Uribe said. “[At] Tufts, if we’re introducing ourselves, a lot of time we do say we’re on a team.”
The nature of competitive sports can affect the way student-athletes relate to others on their team. Even before college, master’s student and fifth-year fencer Lea Levi made most of her friends through some sort of athletic activity.
“If you win and you cry, you can hug them, and if you lose and you cry, you can hug them,” Levi said. “Feeling that way with a friendship is just not really something that goes away.”
There’s something comforting about having friends with similar interests, including that of a sport. But Levi believes that, without the team, it would have been hard to meet fellow fencers. With her freshman year dominated by COVID-19, Levi recalls a social cohort mostly composed of teammates. “We were [kind of] forced our first two years to hang out with mostly athletes,” Levi said.
Tufts allows first-year student-athletes to opt into rooming with another athlete. For senior football player Jameer Alves, living in dorms as an underclassmen actually helped him meet students outside of football. His non-athlete friends are very understanding of his time constraints, and they’ll often find time to hang out by studying together. Still, coming from Atlanta to join one of the largest sports teams on campus was formative for Alves when arriving at Tufts.
“I didn’t know anyone coming up here except for the coaches, [but on football you] automatically meet 100 people, and then on top of that, you could just meet 100 people’s friends,” Alves said. “I live with two of my teammates now in my house, and I feel like the majority of the time, if I’m hanging out with anybody, it’s probably going to be one of my teammates.”
That’s not just true of the high-stakes Division III teams. Tufts’ club and intramural teams also serve as remarkably strong social connectors. Senior Phoebe McMahon remembers being a first-year, trying to find her place at Tufts and not knowing what to do on the weekends. That is, until she joined BWO frisbee — a club-level sports team at Tufts that has a reputation for being social.
“There’s so many people who are able to come into it and feel that sense of growth,” McMahon said. “It’s about bringing people in and building a community, rather than solely trying to be the best at the sport.”
Senior Enrique Delso is a captain of the men’s club soccer brown team. From Madrid, he finds that there aren’t many other international students in the men’s club soccer scene, but he enjoys having different groups of friends.
Meeting an upperclassman on the team was how Delso ended up at his first party at Tufts; they even convinced him to rush DTD. While men’s club and varsity soccer teams do not interact much beyond sporadic joint practices or games, club sports teams often have mixers with each other or with Greek organizations.
ATO has long had a reputation for attracting student-athletes who do water sports, such as swim and dive, rowing, and sailing. ATO member Uribe emphasizes that their events are advertised through word of mouth: If athletes are members, then their teammates will naturally catch wind of the ongoings. Ku believes Greek life and varsity sports have that in common.
“I think exclusivity is one of the biggest denominating factors between the both,” she said. “Getting invited to these social events, you have to either do a sport or know people who do a sport and even then their circles are quite exclusive.”
Uribe agrees that there is a divide between which social activities athletes and non-athletes have access to. He also suspects an atmosphere of separation when athletes move in groups around campus, which some students may find intimidating. But it’s not all homogenous within the sports circles: Uribe chose to help lead Athlete Ally, which highlights queer representation in college athletics, after interacting with some sports that were “more heteronormative than others.”
When it comes to housing, recent graduate Lauren Pollak can speak to sharing a space with teammates. Formerly on the women’s cross-country and track teams, Pollak continued living with her teammates after graduation when they moved to Boston. From the COVID-19 cohorts to off-campus housing, she cherished being able to cohabitate with the cross-country athletes who were some of her closest friends. They would have teammates over for movie nights, unproductive study sessions and carb-loading pasta dinners before races.
“What I liked about Tufts — honestly one of the best things I think — was that most people on the team had friends also outside of the team,” Pollak said. “I have some friends who go to [Division] I schools, and their regimens are very, very strict and much more intense, and so as a result, they really only socialize with their teammates, which makes it, I think, a less enriching experience.”
The extent to which athletes seek connections outside their teams seems to depend on the person. Uribe appreciates having a hideaway from athletics and exposure to other corners of Tufts life.
“It’s nice to take a step away from the sport. I don’t want to be thinking about swimming all the time,” Uribe said. “Sometimes it’s nice to hang out with people who are involved in other things and hear about what they’re doing. … It opens your social circle, and you get to learn about other things going on on campus.”
But there’s something about working together on a team that inevitably brings these athletes close. McMahon argued they might even be closer than other forms of friendship.
“You’re trying to score a goal, you’re trying to learn how to throw a backhand, you’re trying to do all of these other very physical things, and I like the idea of two people trying to work together towards a common goal and becoming friends out of that, rather than just having friendship be the goal,” McMahon said. “I think some of my most natural friendships have come out of sports.”
Whether athlete or NARP (non-athletic regular person, that is), we’re all looking for connection. That even goes for the water gallon-carriers, which Alves cleared up for me. Indeed, it’s mostly a habit of football players, stemming from their intense preseason training that has the team in “football mode” from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. for two weeks in August. Gallons provide the necessary hydration, and some players continue refilling them into the semester. Sustainable kings!
