On the side of the cricket pitch, a student revises her flashcards. Across the Atlantic, another student runs from the track to his school’s academic centre, where he must stay for the next eight hours. Though athletes at Oxford and in the US operate under completely different systems, the differences between them are not so significant.
I came to study at Oxford from a private high school in the US where it is commonplace to find student-athletes recruited to top American universities based on athletic ability. The phrase “going to [a university] for [a sport]” was tossed around frequently between my friends and classmates. On hearing it, I was unfazed. At Oxford, and in the UK generally, however, the idea of sports recruiting (at least at the undergraduate level) is almost unheard of. In conversation with Oxford University Rugby Football Captain (OURFC) Blues Captain Mel Morley, a student at St John’s College, she tells me: “Oxford does not care what your sporting ability is. You can’t be a good applicant bolstered by sport. You have to be an excellent applicant, and then you can be good at sports.” The consequence: many Oxford applications don’t mention athletics, or do so sparingly. Having played four sports – rugby, football, decathlon athletics, and golf – so far in college, Henry Whittaker, a student at St Edmund Hall, didn’t mention any sport in his UCAS application. “Except for a minor part in my teacher’s reference, there was literally no mention of sports in my application,” he tells me. “They don’t care about sports here.”
In the US, the opposite is true. Schools in the NCAA Division I-III leagues, the three highest levels of US intercollegiate sport, are especially known for pursuing students for their athletic ability. Joya Wang, a recruited squash player at Williams College in Massachusetts, tells me: “My admission process involved a lot of Zoom calls with coaches where they will tell you, based on your sports ranking and your grades, how likely you are to get in.” For some students, sport is also the deciding factor in selecting which university to attend. One recruited athlete, Leed Smoole, tells me he chose to commit to the University of Michigan over the University of California, Berkeley, largely because “everything is better here sports-wise, and I like the idea of a big school that is good at sports and academics”.
Despite these initial differences, once they arrive on campus, every student-athlete runs into the same, age-old predicament: time. Athletes that I spoke to at both Oxford and US colleges described weekly sports commitments ranging from 8 hours to as high as 20 hours. I ask them how they manage to juggle athletics with academics. Jacqui Sanitt, a Blues cricket player from Exeter College, tells me: “You have to be very strict with your time management: knowing that you’ll have training and matches that will take up a lot of time, doing work before so that you will have time to do the matches, and, if necessary, bringing flashcards and notes.” During the Trinity exam crunch, she may bring her work to the pitch. Meanwhile, Kostya Huba, a law student from Teddy Hall, who is a goalkeeper for the Blues football team, says: “I feel like I will have to prioritise one over the other at some point. All the second- and third-year law students keep saying, ‘enjoy your first year,’ because it won’t get easier.” Wang, echoing that sentiment, explains to me: “It’s pretty hard because both sport and academics take more time than they used to in high school. All of my time is now split between homework and practice.” When trade-offs are necessary, US students are more likely to sacrifice academic achievement for sporting prowess. Vihaan Batra, a student at Duke University, reflects that his athletic friends “might not have time to be studying for a hard class, so they will take an easier one that is still the hardest they can manage”. Doing the same at Oxford has proven to be more of a challenge. “I would, if I could, ask my tutors to be more flexible with sports,” Huba says. Though the balance between sport and school is a difficult one to maintain, no student-athlete on either side of the Atlantic can afford to drop the (academic) ball. “Even though you play sports, you still have to get good grades,” Smoole tells me.
Time on the pitch also shapes the time off of it, and here again I saw a similarity rooted in a sports truism echoed by former NBA player Jonas Valančiūnas: “Every team you play for, you meet new friends.” The social lives of Oxford Blues and US varsity athletes are usually shaped by their sports. Organised sport socials and outside events, along with the friendships made on the pitch, account for a strong tie between social life and sport. Wang tells me that “events are organised around athletes, so you end up spending a lot of time with your team. You have to push yourself to meet non-athletes”. Across the pond, Morley agrees. “You do have college friends, but lots of my close friends are on the team.” There’s a benefit to this friendship, where shared experiences allow you to strive (and suffer) together. Morley tells me that “it gets to a point where you are all super super close and spend a lot of time together”. “Having a team helps you go through the Oxford experience, because we are all athletes but we are also all students and know what both are like.” She adds that “everyone knows what everyone is going through”.
The real social difference lies in the “public perception” of athletes on campus. In the US, some athletes garner near-celebrity status from their peers – usually linked to their likelihood of deriving significant success from their sport. At Duke, which has produced 17 NBA draft picks in the last five years, basketball players are known by all. “Everyone knows the basketball players. You can’t ask them what their names are, because you know who it is. These kids will likely be gone from the school in a year and be making millions in the next,” Batra tells me. Though sharing the same D1 rank, Duke’s other teams don’t share the spotlight. “The soccer team is insane and the rowing team too – but nobody cares.” It’s a sharp contrast to Oxford athletics. “People usually are impressed you’re doing so much, or they don’t give a shit,” Whittaker says.
The life of a college athlete in the US is not one an Oxford athlete may easily relate to when thinking of the recruiting process, celebrity status, or ability to shift academics to accommodate sports. But look past it, and the similarities are profound: both share a commitment to work hard, a will to succeed, a sense of community, and a genuine “love of the game”.
