Welcome to Stanford and the U.S.A.
If you are a new student arriving from abroad, I am sure you are very excited to be here and looking forward to your next few years on the Farm. You probably feel quite privileged and proud that you managed to jump through all the hoops in the application process and earn acceptance to one of the world’s top academic institutions. What you might not be aware of yet, though, is that you have encountered the good fortune to also land at an athletic powerhouse.
My own preconceptions of college sports in the U.S. were founded on Hollywood movies and TV shows; when I first came here, I was expecting something different. But as Stanford had never come up in those stories, I thought it probably just had an average athletic department. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Don’t let anyone try and convince you otherwise, this is unquestionably the No. 1 U.S. university for sports. It might not have as long and storied of a history as others in big-money disciplines like football, baseball and basketball, but its strength lies in playing at the top of a huge range of sports. The Cardinal is on a 17-year streak of winning the Director’s Cup for success in collegiate athletics, and this dominance has been so emphatic that last year a new award was created largely to give other schools a chance. Against a poorly weighted scoring system, it still took first and fifth place in the women’s and men’s competitions, respectively.
Even in the highly competitive realm of football, Stanford is now claiming enviable success, finishing fourth in the country last year. This season it could perhaps have a realistic shot at the BCS National Championship, the Holy Grail of college athletics.
The really good news for you is that as a student, you get free access to pretty much every sporting event on campus. That even includes football, as your student ID grants you automatic membership in the Red Zone. This year, even men’s basketball is free. The bad news is that you may need to learn to navigate the point-scoring system to get a chance to go to any of the really sought-after football or basketball games. But you’re Stanford students now; you should be able to do the math.
College sports in the United States are basically professional in all but name, and any dedicated student shouldn’t miss the chance for both a free t-shirt and a year of free entertainment. You might, though, need some help adjusting.
The language, for a start, is unique. Even just hearing Americans discuss my favorite non-U.S. sport (soccer to them, football to me) sounds a little bit alien to me. The pitch becomes a field, boots become cleats, a clean sheet is a shutout and a one-nil scoreline becomes one-and-oh. And don’t get me started on winningest; it is not a real word.
If you can, try and find a friendly American to tutor you and explain all the rules. Watching any live sport is about having fun with the rest of the fans, so finding some of those fans to hang around with and teach you how to cheer shouldn’t be too tough. You will, however, need a head for numbers, because talking about sports in the United States is all about statistics. Each game generates a box score that exhaustively converts the players’ successes and failures into hard numbers. A player can’t just have a good game; they need to tick the right boxes.
The hardest part, in my experience, will be keeping time. U.S. sports, in general, flow a lot slower than foreign ones because of multiple stoppages and timeouts during the games; the last few seconds of tight basketball games can go on forever. Even after a few years of watching games, this is still something I struggle with. I don’t mean to drift off during an exciting football game, but when I’m waiting for the play to restart, I often find myself people-watching in the stadium, only to glance back down in time to realize I just missed the action.
The best advice I could give you, though, is to be humble and keen to learn. American sports are no better than foreign ones, but they are also no worse, just different. Like learning a foreign language, if you show a willingness to try and resist talking too much in your own tongue, you’ll have a great experience here.
Hopefully I’ll see you on the bleachers.
Tom Taylor’s many years of vacationing in Stanford’s engineering program have yet to teach him the ways of U.S. sports. If you can commiserate with Tom or would like to give him a lesson in all things ‘Merica, drop him a line at tom.taylor“at”stanford.edu.