University of Chicago Top Questions

Tell us about the sports scene on campus.

Anna Lee

With relation to sports, there are three groups of people on campus, with each successive group being larger than the preceding group. First, there are the student athletes who train and compete in official NCAA athletic competitions. (Participants in a few of the more intense sport clubs such as crew and water polo may also belong to this category.) These students tend to live in the Max Pavlesky dorm (because it is the closest to the two athletic centers), they tend to all be friends (or at least know each other), and they are the students who are most likely to attend sporting events at the university. The second group includes students who participate in sport clubs or intramural sports and/or who exercise on a regular basis. This second group is the largest and consists of widest variety of students. Finally, the third group is composed to those students who do not participate in intramural sports and who exercise irregularly or not at all. In the past few years, the prominence of Greek life on campus has increased while the overall level of quirkiness of the student body has decreases. A side effect of these developments has been that the sports scene on campus has become slightly more prominent as well, and this trend is likely to continue in the same direction. For more information about athletics at the University of Chicago, visit http://athletics.uchicago.edu/index.html.

Claire

We do have athletes and students typically know a few people involved in sports, but going to the actual games and supporting teams throughout each season is much more rare. Inter-house sports are more of a weekly distraction from work than a real sports effort.