Sports at Cornell

Dear followers,
Today I am going to tell you about sports at Cornell. Americans have quite a different view on sports than we do. We have average level university sports clubs, in which all students can enroll and compete at different levels. At Cornell, there are four ways to do sports.

You can practice as part as your curriculum, which means you get academic credits for it. You are allowed to take 2 credits for Physical Education courses. The range of different things offered is crazy. You can take snowboarding lessons as well as salsa ones. Besides, you can also get a gym pass and go to the fitness, enjoying yourself on your own or taking gym classes like Zumba, spinning or abdominal training. Furthermore, you can join a club, which is approximately similar to what we know in Wageningen: trainings and fun together, passion for a sport, competitions but not too crazy. I would love to join the running club but a knee injury prevents me from enjoying the hilly landscape for the moment. I hope I will be able to join trainings in the summer.

Finally, I will tell you about NCAA level sports. This is the highest university level, where students get scholarships and train at least once a day. Cornell has an amazing ice hockey team. The rink is completely filled with students during matches, all super enthusiastic and absolutely proud of Cornell.  Everyone wears red Cornell shirts, sweaters, hats, scarves and sometimes even backpacks! Students get really crazy when we play against Harvard. There is a historically ice-hockey fight between these two universities, which makes the tension during matches extremely high. To show Harvard players their supposed inferiority, Cornell folks throw dead fish on the ice at the moment that the Harvadians get on the rink. And they shout “Harvard sucks! Harvard sucks” all the time during the game. It is pretty impressive to see how the rink gets covered with fish and how the smell stays in the stadium for the whole game.

Hope you are enjoying spring in Holland,

See you,

Lotta