MCGINN AND TONIC: Facilities too Good To House Princeton

There’s little to admire about Princeton, much less imitate.

The sterile town, brimming with haughty WASPs, oozing with pretension, a Banana Republic advertisement writ large. Nassau Street, the primary artery bordering the college, stripped of all vivacity, home to a pancake house, an ATM and little else. The university, a third-wheel in a two-school rivalry, pitifully attempting to insert itself into a game like The Game, a little sister trying to finagle her way into her older brothers’ wrestling match, sent to her room crying with nothing more than a black eye.

Sure, Yale sucks, but Princeton? Not even worth an inane seventh-grade invective.

No, once you’ve mailed in the postcard telling the admissions office you’ll be taking up residence in New England next fall, thank you very much, there’s actually very little reason thoughts of New Jersey would even cross your mind, save the occasional gubernatorial coming-out party.

Unless you’re considering Cambridge’s second-rate athletics facilities, of course.

Yes, sadly, it’s true. Our ugly step-cousins from the Garden State have us beaten rather thoroughly when it comes to their sports complexes.

Given Princeton’s bent towards a sort of celebration of excellence in a cornucopia of fields and not academics alone—that is to say its love of winning basketball, soccer and lacrosse games, and maybe football, too, if only its program weren’t so wretched—its superiority in this one facet, and only this one, should come as little surprise.

For those Crimson Crazies fortunate enough to take in Harvard’s 39-14 romp over the Tigers on Saturday—and judging by a quick scan of the stands, there weren’t many of you not dressed in a cheerleader or band uniform—Princeton Stadium, the site of the carnage, was quite a sight to behold, a modern temple to a sport the school isn’t even very good at.

Completed before the start of the 1998 season and conveniently located 30 seconds by foot from the street most of the school’s eating clubs call home, the building is one many Division-I football programs would be proud to call home. The glaring eyesores are relatively few and far between—though the skeletal statues of two Tigers mid-pounce guarding a main stairway come immediately to mind. Modern amenities are built directly into the main thoroughfares, fans are seated close to the action and seated comfortably, and a this-century-model scoreboard rises from a gently sloping hill that overlooks the field. There are even, I kid you not, luxury boxes.

Compare that to Harvard Stadium—literally the oldest operational football field in the country—more than 100-years young, yet arguably as pleasant as during its teen years that led up to World War I. No luxury boxes—hell, I’m still thankful the press box has electricity—but the concrete seating is fan-friendly to be sure, the mobile toilets are armed with pine-tree air fresheners, and the walk to the field’s Allston home isn’t so bad from the Business School. From the Quad? Well, that’s a different story.

Princeton’s sizeable edge extends well beyond its turn-of-this-century football stadium, though. Home of the school’s basketball teams, Jadwin Gymnasium—though certainly not comparable to its counterparts at, say, Duke or North Carolina—easily outstrips Lavietes Pavilion in every respect, including, historically at least, the product on the court. But that’s no reason for Harvard to slap together an arena that wouldn’t pass muster at an upper-end high school program.

But my qualms with Harvard’s football and basketball facilities are, centrally anyway, limited to considerations of fan environment and overall atmosphere for the spectator. The dimensions of football fields and basketball courts are standard and unaffected by their shoddy surroundings. As far as I’m aware, the grass on the gridiron, while torn up as a result of play, has been properly maintained. The basketball court is not pockmarked by dead spots and warped wood.

And it’s not as if fans are coming down to the games in droves, though they might if seats more inviting than the current concrete slabs at the football stadium were installed. The point is, though, that none of what either of those programs lacks in any way hurts its performance on the field. (Unless you want to consider why anyone would want to play in front of 1,000 ambivalent fans at his home gym, when he could easily play at Jadwin or the Palestra in front of an average of three to six times as many diehards. But I digress.)

But Harvard’s hockey programs, nationally competitive each year, receive even shabbier treatment from the university when it comes to essential facilities than do their counterparts at Princeton. And it’s not as if the Tigers are very good. The men won five games last year. Five! That’s fewer than Harvard won in the ECAC tournament alone. Princeton hasn’t been good since college hockey great Hobey Baker last laced his skates for the Tigers, and that was in 1914.

Yet, Princeton has coughed up the cash to install a refrigeration system that keeps Baker Rink usable nearly year round, just one of several improvements made to the arena since it was first constructed. Harvard? The ice was still being installed for the 2004-05 slate on Wednesday, Sept. 29. To put that date in context, one of the men’s hockey team’s league opponents, Vermont, opened play on Oct. 2.

Yes, the Crimson’s seasons do start later, in keeping with Ivy League regulations. But forcing the hockey teams—both NCAA tournament participants last year—to pile into cars they need to scramble to find, then head off-site in search of ice to hold captain’s practice? The practice guidelines which curtail out-of-season workouts in the interest of forcing athletes to be otherwise involved already require the consistent performance of miracles to even contend on a national level, let alone thrive. Why add yet another disadvantage against non-conference competition on top of the restrictions already in place?

Sure, the athletes say they don’t mind, that they’re used to it by now, that it doesn’t affect their early-season performance. That may be true, and it may not be, but that question is irrelevant. Far more important is why Harvard, proud home of the nation’s largest Division I athletics program, consistently short changes those who provide that extra feather in President Lawrence H. Summers’ cap.

The answer, of course, is money, as it always is. For while Harvard has the largest endowment of any university, retooling Hilles Library into dance studios no one will use is infinitely more important than providing arenas the administration hopes no one will ever want to fill, and building campus hot spots like Loker Commons will always take precedent over a football stadium with a decent place to tailgate.

The baseball team is fortunate because Joe O’Donnell—their patron saint, after whom their field is named and with whose money their new dugouts are being built—will always take care of them. But Harvard’s other programs? Well, they’ll just have to hope Harvard Stadium doesn’t fall apart and the ice doesn’t take too long to freeze.

—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.