To the Vassar community,
We as the Intramural Athletes Association want to address the current campus climate regarding intramural athletics. We’re very disappointed to see so much snow around this time of year, which is physically preventing us from starting our outdoor spring season. It seems like the whole world has turned a cold shoulder to our right to petty competition. We demand that Vassar do something about this icy atmosphere around us.
Apart from the climate itself, our athletes find themselves routinely feeling like we get the worst of both the athletic and non-athletic worlds. We face ridicule from non-athletes, who criticize our unflinching ability to play wiffleball as ruthlessly as possible, but also from those who so offensively call themselves “real athletes.” We prefer to call them “Registered Collegiate Players.” These players tell us that we are washed up has-beens from high school, clinging to a time when we were relevant athletes.
We believe that this type of rhetoric generates a dangerous climate for our barely upright identity, an identity that is currently only kept afloat by opportunities to knock each other over in Walker twice a week.
By publishing this letter in the well-frequented newspaper, we hope to encourage the Vassar community at large to take intramural athletes as seriously as we take ourselves. We now intend to lay out the physical and mental adjustments that our campus must make to repair the damage our athletes have sustained in addition the injuries we give each other bi-weekly.
Firstly, we must dispel the attitude that intramural athletes are merely old high school sports MVPs who couldn’t take it to the collegiate level. The reality is that some of us won the most improved player (MIP) for our high schools, and others got little playing time at all and have never recovered from that. Some of us were merely just looking for a way to compete in the most simultaneously brutal and petty manner since Monopoly.
Intramural sports has already brought together people who like to argue with student referees completing work study. We also hope to bridge the gap between the Registered Collegiate Players and our intramural athletes.
We believe that the interscholastic teams could stand to gain from our gym-class hero mentality, and that we could learn how to physically play the sports we so desperately want to be good at. A good starter for this liaison could be to connect with the Ultimate Frisbee team, who represent a perfect middle ground between intramural and intercollegiate athletics. They may also be the athletic group that takes themselves the third-most seriously, behind only us and Quidditch.
In addition to attitude changes, we implore the college to finance a 57 million-dollar project to build an elevated, entirely glass sports pavilion using tops of the four quad dorms as a foundation. Along with these improved facilities, we hope to be able to subsidize uniforms and televised coverage of our own Premier League Soccer (patent pending).
We firmly believe that through a concentrated effort, we can bring unbridled competitiveness and sap the fun out of every sport and fake sport alike.
-The Intramural Athletes Association