Archery worthy of big-time coverage

Around this time last year, Spec’s sports editors decided to resume coverage of Columbia’s varsity archery team, ending the paper’s several-year hiatus from the sport. In response, I wrote a column entitled “Archery not worthy of big-time coverage,” which was published exactly one year ago today.

I argued that archery, while technically a sport, lacks the competitive, adrenaline-filled spirit of sports like football and basketball to be interesting to many Spec readers. My thesis sparked a firestorm of backlash, particularly and unsurprisingly from the archery team. Some called for my job, others demanded I retract my comments, and a former archery team member even challenged me to a shoot-off. I’ve had a year to reflect on that article, the controversy it spawned, and, most importantly, the Columbia varsity archery team. Here’s what I’ve learned.

At its core, archery is a simple sport—straightforward, self-explanatory, and relatively easy to follow. The staples of more popular contact sports are absent from archery. Archery is less violent, slower-paced and naturally more TV-adverse than sports like football, basketball, or hockey. It may not appear exciting to a casual observer at first. At least that was my reaction when I watched the team compete a couple years ago. So when I was informed last year that Spec would reinstate the archery beat, my response was “What for?” It is this question that I’ve constantly come back to over the past year.

Being a Spec sports writer means coping with what may perhaps be the defining paradox of Columbia athletics: the fan-friendly sports underperform, while the non-fan-friendly sports overachieve. Obviously there have been exceptions to this assertion, but on the whole it’s true. Sports writers are sports fans, so naturally we want to write about the sports we love most. Due to their national popularity, baseball, football, and basketball are indisputably the most popular section beats. They are more familiar to us than, say, squash or rowing, and they tend to garner the most fan interest. Yet these programs at Columbia—the ones that receive an overwhelming majority of overall Spec sports coverage—tend to give us little reason to celebrate.

On the flip side, teams that bring home national titles usually pass under the radar. Why? Because the majority of the time they are sports we either don’t care about or don’t understand. As a result, successful programs are eclipsed by our subpar headliner sports.

The disparity between the archery and football teams is a quintessential example. I hate to pick on football, but it has unfortunately become a laughingstock on campus. And rightfully so. Since its conception, the program has only won a single championship in an eight-team division—this season it barely won a single game. Meanwhile, the archery program has consistently excelled on Ivy and national stages. Just last year archery’s recurve team won the national title at the United States Intercollegiate Archery Championships. Many of you probably didn’t know that, but chances are you know the football team sucks. Aye, there’s the rub.

Columbia sports fans may never come to love archery more than football, but paying attention to underachieving marquee teams while ignoring successful low-profile sports only reinforces sweeping perceptions that our athletics program is a joke.

Perceptions have for too long dictated the discourse of Columbia athletics in this paper and on this campus. There is no simple solution to fundamentally changing broad notions that Columbia sports are bad across the board, but we can start by taking notice of small sports that produce big results.

Maybe we’ve been looking for success in all the wrong places—mainly and almost exclusively from our headliner sports. Nationally competitive teams, many that send members to the Olympics, are right under our noses. Archery, fencing, crew, and other low-profile sports are just a few of the bright spots of Columbia athletics, and we should give them the attention they merit. In that spirit, I wish to revise my headline from last year: “Archery is worthy of big-time coverage.”

Michael Shapiro is a List College senior majoring in history and modern Jewish studies.

If you are a Columbia University student or alum interested in writing a guest column, please email sportscolumns@columbiaspectator.com.