The Lines They Walk On

In conversation at Harvard, be it over a dining hall meal, a problem set, or a drink, it is not rare to learn that your fellow interlocutor is an athlete. Of the many responses or follow-up questions that might arise, a natural one is whether the person walked on or was recruited.

“I don’t like it when people ask me that question,” says Nephat K. Maritim ’15, sipping his tea in the Barker Center Cafe. Maritim walked onto the track team his freshman year after arriving from Kenya while taking courss in departments ranging from Romance Languages and Literatures to African Studies, to Computer Science. Maritim doesn’t want to resign himself to the perpetuity of the stereotypes surrounding athletes. “You don’t need to choose between being an athlete and being a student,” he says, “You can be a student-athlete.”

Maritim remembers feeling frustrated with a culture of categorization he found pervasive his freshman year. “Usually when I was among athletes on my team who were doing very well, I felt like I constantly needed to prove myself,” Maritim says. “Whenever I crossed the river to come to this side, I also felt I had to constantly prove myself. If you’re a walk-on, you’re left in this middle ground between these two opposing social groups that deny your place. But I don’t feel it anymore.”

“Running had been such an important part of my life,” he says, “and I just wanted to continue.” He spoke to Harvard’s coaches when he arrived on campus, hoping to join the varsity team. “They didn’t seem very eager to have me join,” he adds. “I told them that I was capable of being 48 seconds for the 400 meter. Of course I didn’t have any proof.” They let him try out anyway.

Try-outs that September for about 10 hopeful sprinters ended with a 300m race. Maritim came in second, and he and the student who came in first place made the team.

Each Harvard team takes a slightly different approach to the walk-on process, requiring different levels of skill and experience. As many as 30 or 40 people might walk on to a section of the varsity crew team, for example, though sometimes as few as five of that class remain on the team until they graduate. The current ski team holds 12 students total, three of whom walked on.

“I don’t want to say that athletics is the reason that recruited kids got here because it’s obviously a combination of a lot of things,” begins Neal, who walked on to two different teams since he arrived, and was granted anonymity by The Crimson because he did not want to speak publicly about stereotypes surrouding athletes. “But for me, I really appreciate the fact that I’m able to do it, because it’s not why I came here.”

Though for Neal, sports were “basically all [he] did in high school,” he says, he planned to focus on academics here at Harvard, until he found that neither academics nor athletics were as intimidating as he expected. Neal says he appreciates his teams but isn’t as obvious about being a member of DHAS as others.

“I don’t figure myself as a jock, but I think a lot of kids that do athletics here probably do,” he explains. When asked what he identifies with, he responds, “Nothing. No social description.”

Before Neal joined the team, he remembers walking into Annenberg, seeing the first two tables full of chummy athletes, and feeling like he was missing out. “Now that I’m on the team,” he says, “I see the different side of that. Which is, you know, the people sitting at those two tables are just like most people.”

Maritim also disagrees with confining athletes to a particular box. “I just think that these stereotypes are totally unnecessary,” Maritim says. “We need to be working with each other, collaborating, learning from each other.”

Much of the basis for negative stereotypes about athletes lies in the recruiting process, which results in perceptions that athletes are not as academically qualified as their Harvard classmates. Many recruits begin conversation with coaches of university teams their junior year of high school, and have begun receiving likely letters by October of their senior year. They still have to go through the application process, “but it makes things a lot less stressful, a lot easier, so it is sort of unfair,” says Mimi M. Tanski ’15, a pre-med student recruited to the women’s heavyweight crew team.

On account of this diffrent admissions experience, recruited athletes can be associated with stereotypes that are not applied to walk-ons. “Probably the most obvious stereotype is that the athlete kids aren’t as smart as the rest of Harvard kids,” says Neal. “I think everyone is aware of that stereotype. I think anyone would be lying to you that would say that’s not true at some level, because from my experience, it is a little bit.”

Maura D. Church ’14, a joint Applied Math and Music concentrator who walked on Radcliffe’s heavyweight crew team her freshman fall, is aware of the stereotypes. “You’ll hear, ‘Oh you know that’s an athlete class.’ And so, I kind of prefer to disassociate myself from that.” She mentions that she has never felt stereotyped, acknowledging that she feels “pretty far away from the athletic identity at Harvard.” “I don’t go to class in my DHAs,” she adds.

Church believes the stereotypes are based on misconceptions. “People devote their time to different things,” she says. “I think there’s sometimes a targeting of like, ‘Oh because you do [sports], that’s less smart.’”

Harvard provides a space to excel and fail at things with which students have all kinds of degrees of experience, harvesting pre-existing skills and investing in new ones. Mary M. Carmack ’16 knew nothing about rowing until she walked on to the heavyweight team last fall. She raced in the first varsity boat at this year’s Head of the Charles. In high school, Carmack was involved in sports, community service, clubs, academic teams, and music, but in college she chose to focus on rowing and leading FOP. When she measures that time against now she says, “I feel like I get a lot more out of the few things I’m doing.”

“If it’s what you find you are enjoying and want to continue with, and are excited to do each day, then it’s like, ‘I should definitely stick with this,’” she says. “Why wouldn’t I?”

For many walk-on athletes, the learning curve has dissolved palpable feelings of inadequacy that distinguished them from recruited teammates freshman year. “I didn’t feel yet that I was good enough, or that I had as much ownership over the team to really say, yeah I’m a part of this group,” says Church. “Now, I feel like I have full ownership over the team, that I’m a senior and a leader, I feel like I can really say, ‘Yeah, I’m on the varsity crew team.’”

“If someone walks on who improves and is better than someone who is recruited, they’ll 100% be in ahead of them.” says James E. K. Croxford ’16, an Australian heavyweight crew recruit. Especially in such measurable sports as crew and track, opportunities to compete can be clearly based on merit, so hard work and persistence pay off, regardless of how a person got onto the team.

Maritim also describes the athletic system as being meritocratic. “If there’s a big race and I’m trying to decide between five of you guys and I want two of you who are going to race, it’s very simple,” Maritim explains. “Based on how you’ve been training and how you’ve been racing, I can tell that you are in better shape than this guy. At that point, it really doesn’t matter who’s where.”

This is part of what makes Croxford appreciate those who walked onto his team. “It just ends up making the whole team stronger,” he states. He believes that when the walk-ons improve, everyone wants to step their game up, because they don’t want to lose their spot in the boat. “It’s a chain reaction,” he says.

“Generally,” Church says, “the attitude within the team is like who cares? You know, like we don’t need to prove ourselves, we’re smart we know we’re doing incredible things on this team, within this sport, and that’s kind of an outdated stereotype that is just going to exist.”

“It’s really stressful, but it’s really rewarding,“ Tanski, the heavyweight recruit, says. The four hours or more of practice six days a week mandate patience, dedication, and passion. “I can’t imagine my life without it.”

“The team is something that I cannot live without right now,” James Lim ’16, a walk-on sprinter says.

“I don’t know what I would do with myself,” Neal says.

“It’s definitely a lifestyle,” Emma R. Payne ’16, a track distance walk-on says.

Lim, who says track and field would definitely come first or second in terms of his key traits as a Harvard student, has no regrets about his choices about how he has chosen to spend his time here.

“You had the guts to decide, I want to try and do this thing,” he says “which is not an easy task.” Walk-ons, Lim supposes, tend to think more about the option of leading the non-athletic life at Harvard, but made the conscious choice to seek out the opportunity to play. “We somehow managed to make it, and I think that speaks towards our true passion for the sport.”

Back at the Barker Cafe, Maritim is about to finish his tea. Tapping the cup on the table rhythmically, he shares how he has chosen to deal with Harvard’s categorization culture. “I never ask anyone whether they were recruited or not.”

“Cause once we are done with college, for example, we will be working with people who both walked on and didn’t walk on,” he continues, “and be expected to perform the same way.”