Athletics
Christina Spencer '11
On injury: "For the past week, I've had to sit out from the Yeowomen's Basketball team with a sprained ankle. Being unable to play or practice has only intensified my passion for this sport. Now, I crave basketball." [more]Luke Herrine '10
On being part of a team: "I heard a knock on my door. I opened it to find every single Horsecow who had come out to practice that day staring back at me. The Flying Horsecows [make] everybody love to play Ultimate, even when you can't." [more]Nicky Ouellet '09
On running and surviving senior year: "I outlined my thesis on thirteen-mile long runs. I wrote my application essays on bus rides to races. My experiences as a student-athlete influenced my proposal to study high-school athletics during my Fulbright year in Russia." [more]John Shaw '07
On training: "With the curtain obscuring most of the fieldhouse from view, the track became a tunnel that my distance mates and I would fly around countless times at every imaginable speed and level of (dis)comfort." [more]Greg Mangan '09
On his roommate, Mike Loll, during their first pre-season: "He knew all the plays. He knew where to be at all times. He moved effortlessly through the logjam of the field. He was a natural." [more]Nicholas Bermeo '11
On meeting his teammates on the lacrosse team the first night at Oberlin: "I went to sleep that night dreaming about how much fun Oberlin would be and trying to guess what great stories I would tell the freshmen when I am a senior." [more]Emily Whitaker '12
On the last field hockey game of the season: "All at once, the reality of my situation hit me hard. In one hundred and eighty seconds my first varsity field hockey season would be over, and I found myself unprepared...I had never felt more part of a team." [more]Mike Dirda '09
On the men's Ultimate Frisbee team's year-round outdoor practices: "The cold tests our mettle, and when a seemingly endless winter finally departs, we know that we're tougher and harder than any of our opponents." [more]Shira Korn '11
On Oberlin being a Division III school: "This means that athletes are not allowed assistance in the admissions process or monetary incentives to come to a school, [which] meant that everyone on our team was participating purely for love of the sport." [more]Elizabeth Wong '12
On her first home volleyball game at Oberlin: "It had been my dream to play college volleyball since I can remember and as I stood star struck looking up at the flag, I could not help but smile and realize that I had done it. I was living the dream." [more]Dore Kiesselbach '88
On his poem about football at Oberlin: "The moment of revelatory tenderness I try to capture in this poem, exposed as it was by this rough game, meant as much to me as anything else I experienced as a student and remains very poignant to me today." [more]Leanne Wagner '76
On progress toward gender equality: "Watching my daughter ... study with many more than one woman professor in the sciences, and not be constrained in her choices of what was to come after Oberlin, I realize that the Oberlin tradition of firsts has brought change to the world." [more]Meghan Schott '06
On the freedom to be herself: "At Oberlin, for the first time I was able to venture well outside-the-box without criticism. For Halloween, the soccer staff allowed the players to dress up for practice ... [and I] decided to be a TV." [more]Marne Litfin '07
On her first day of practice with the women's rugby team: "These were, I realized while I stood apart from them, the strongest and craziest women I had ever met. I had to be one of them. I didn't know if I had it in me, but I couldn't leave without trying." [more]Derrick Bean '09
On the work-play balance at Oberlin: "I can study archeology, work out to pass the next fitness test, and rehearse my scene for Shakespeare class, all the while hanging out with people from all social circles with diverse interests." [more]
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