Let me preface this by saying that I do love this school. I complain a lot about us not having football or real parties. I've berated students for not coming out and supporting our teams. But when push comes to shove, I do love this school. Except for one thing: open gym.
I may not be like former AU greats Andre Ingram or Glenn Stokes or Patrick Doctor, but I do love basketball and want to hone my skills on the Bender Arena floor. And every day, I check the Fitness Center Web site and get so excited about the open gyms scheduled for 4:30 or 8:00. I get so excited I plan my days around it. Class till 3:30, gym till 5, dinner till 6, homework till 8 and then a solid hour of 3-on-3 with my buddies.
Yet night after night, I run to the gym, ready to go, and night after night I'm disappointed. Either the gym isn't in fact open, or the cheerleaders and dance team are taking up 75 percent of the gym, or any number of diversions to my basketball prowess is going on.
If AU wants to become Georgetown and wants to charge damn near $40,000 a year for higher education, the least it can do is light the outdoor courts or build a non-athlete gym for students to play in. One place where we can build a non-athlete facility is on the old arsenic field.
Supposedly, that space is going to be the intramural field, but I played intramural football this year, and I had to truck it down off campus to the Tenley field every week.
I'm not alone in my disdain. Nightly, I walk down to the gym, and stand there in disgust and talk to others about how crazy it is that we can't play the game we love.
Why? Because AU practices go over their scheduled times. Because the dance team takes more than its allotted time to learn its one routine. Because Bender opens one court for its 2,000 basketball-playing students.
I don't blame AU athletics. I love the Eagles. I don't blame the dance team. Those girls can rock it to U2. I blame the people who whet my appetite with the idea that I may have one unabated hour with my buddies and my game, and then always take it away.
I asked around this week, talking to Jacobs Fitness Center staff and other students, seeing if this was an epidemic or merely an overreaction. And while few were as passionately upset as I am, they all commented that I was not the first complainant and that this was more than just my whiny attitude.
Now, while this is a negative, isn't this what AU wants? Students excited about basketball, coming out to support the team and work on their own game. More students playing basketball means more students enjoying basketball and rooting for AU basketball, and more students rooting for AU basketball means more wins for AU and more money in the box office.
So, I encourage Athletic Director Joni Comstock and President Benjamin Ladner, neither of whom I blame at all for this current problem, to figure out a solution. As our basketball teams knock on the Patriot League door and work for an NCAA tournament berth, why don't we support the other students who go here?
You know, the students whose outrageous tuitions pay for the scholarships of our athletes, the salaries of our Bender Arena workers and the upkeep of our facilities. The students who come out to support the Eagles when their time could be better spent studying or doing "extracurricular" activities.
But I'll keep going to "open" gym and hoping that AU will soon stop biting the hands that feeds it. Because we love the Eagles, the school, the sport ... we just want to play it more.
