How Milton Shows School Spirit: It Doesn’t
By ELIZA BARRETT-COTTER ‘20
A couple of weeks ago, both the field hockey and boys’ soccer teams had back-to-back Friday night games under the lights at BB&N. Playing under the lights usually adds an element of excitement and competitiveness if the fans show up. Unfortunately, a lack of support at Milton sporting events has become the norm. This indifference can be discouraging for any athlete, especially given the amount of support shown at other prep schools and even at the various theater productions on campus.
As the field hockey team left the locker room at BB&N prior to the game and walked out to the field for warmups, the BB&N football team had crowded around the doors to cheer on and hype up their fellow athletes on the field hockey team. Throughout that game, the football players stayed present and aware of the game; their loud encouragement never ceased, and they seemed to be genuinely excited to be there. Even after the game, when we had come out on top (2-1), the football players stuck around to congratulate their peers on a game well fought. That is school spirit.
I am not saying that we should have had more Milton student fans supporting us at this particular game, although it would have been nice if boys’ soccer had been a little more alert during the game. I understand why most may not want to schlep out to Cambridge on a Friday night — for the most part. All other things being equal, had that game been at home, I would not have been surprised if BB&N still had more fans because other schools’ student bodies are for whatever reason more proactive and supportive of each other than we are. We’re just getting worse.
Take the annual Friday night lights football game. During my freshman year, it was a huge deal: players on the team made announcements in assemblies, SAA organized fan buses and, when the fan buses couldn’t pull through, faculty members made students aware of how to get to the field via public transportation. Some teams’ practices even let out early to allow students time to get to the game. The bleachers had been split into a BB&N fan section and a Milton fan section, each bursting with students and even some teachers, sporting school colors and cold weather gear. It was freezing cold outside, but still few left before the end of the game.
Weather conditions were similar at this year’s tilt against Roxbury Latin, but the cold isn’t what made the Milton side of the stands so empty because it certainly didn’t keep the RL fans at bay. In the week leading up to the game, I received just a single email about a fan bus that showed up late. Despite the lack of excitement preceding the game and my looming SAT the next morning, I went expecting the energy of the crowd to be like in years past — something I wouldn’t want to miss. The few who were at there made up an unenthusiastic audience despite the intense nature of the game. This season, something unnecessarily controversial happened: we got a turf field. At our first home game of the season against Exeter, we were excited to have drawn a full crowd of students and a few faculty, not just parents. The crowd, as it turned out, was not a very animated one, even when we scored. When the game ended, the stands emptied of students and faculty fairly quickly, leaving, as always, the parents. But games with some sort of added excitement like those I’ve just mentioned are not the only games at which we as students should be supporting our peers, and the faculty should be supporting their students and advisees. Furthermore, us athletes cannot be idle in our exasperation. On the contrary, we should be the driving force if we want to fix this problem: if we want people at our games, we must go to others’ games as well.