In January 2002, a girl who is five-foot-one on a good day became enamored with college basketball.
I had just arrived at Binghamton University after transferring from Ithaca College after having some grand “life realization” that I didn’t belong in sports media, but in education. (Life realizations made at age 19 should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but try telling 19 year old me that.) I decided to transfer to a state school because I knew any education career path included graduate school, and thus I needed to make better decisions about where I spent my Federal Student Loan money.
Transferring to any school mid-year is a lonelier endeavor than sitting alone in a movie theater watching a film on its last day at the second-run dollar theatre. Fortunately, I had mastered being alone from years of being the sports obsessed geek at a performing arts high school. What was free that I could spend my time doing around campus?
Watching Division I basketball.
Despite my swearing that I had left the sports geek 48 miles down New York’s Route 79 and was no longer going to entertain myself watching games or reading Sports Illustrated, I found myself attending games by myself at Binghamton’s West Gym. It was January, so the Division I Bearcats men’s basketball team was firmly in the thick of their first season in America East, playing University of New Hampshire, University of Albany, University of Vermont and, a school that would end up being a giant part of my future, Boston University.
The other BU had not been on my radar for undergrad because of its distance away, nor had it been on my radar to transfer to. But that first time Boston U. visited Binghamton U. in 2002, I sat there on the wooden bleachers and blindingly bright florescent lighting of the West Gym and thought, “Huh, I totally forgot they existed, but maybe I should look into them when it comes time for grad school.”
A lot of those style of thoughts came to me during that winter of basketball because I never sat with other students in the bleachers. I was too shy. I sat by myself and got lost in the play. My knowledge of college basketball had been limited to whatever I saw Syracuse do growing up, having lived an hour west of the Orange. A lot of my sitting by myself was me trying to teach myself aspects of the game I didn’t know, combined with trying to convince myself to not to give into the loneliness, drop out of college, jump on the next bus out of the rundown Front Street Greyhound station home to Rochester and just become a preschool dance teacher.
Not your typical basketball game thinking.
It was while watching Nick Billings (The Alaskan Giant and therefore, the most recognizable guy on the Binghamton campus) and his fellow Bearcats that winter that I realized my time loving sports wasn’t over. Maybe that decision made at the rolling hills of Ithaca was made in haste. Even if I wasn’t going to work in it, I could still enjoy watching it.
I didn’t get to as many games as I wanted the next two seasons because of the two jobs I had during my junior and senior years, but I always followed the team. I made sure to go to that last regular season home game my senior year, one of the first events at the still-construction-dust filled Events Center: B U. versus BU. I had received my graduate school admission to Boston University just weeks before, and barring Harvard’s decision (which turned out to be no), was headed there in May. And I wrote about that game in my then less than a year old blog, which I had started because I realized while in Binghamton that not only was I not done watching sports, I wasn’t done writing about them either.
So to wake up this morning and have the BUs now officially split – Boston U. a member of the Patriot League and Binghamton U, left in America East – feels all sorts of uneasy. I work at Boston U. now, and I knew the school was thinking of jumping years before they actually did. I work and hang out with people who despise America East because of many reasons, some valid (the ruling Boston U. ineligible to participate in postseason play after they declared their intention to move to the Patriot League) and some less so (that Boston U. is “too good” to play with those “not as classy” SUNY schools. And yes, someone has said that to my face, of which I had to answer, “I went to one of those SUNY schools you speak of,” and watch their face turn 16 shades of red.)
My reasons for missing America East may be purely nostalgia filled, which may make them less valid for the money and “keeping up appearances” filled nature of college sports. But there was always a little bit of poetic justice in the idea of state schools like Binghamton, Stony Brook and Vermont being equals on with the monolith Boston University has become on some plane. My undergrad could play with the big boy schools where one year of tuition equaled cost the price of my entire undergraduate education – and they could sometimes win.
My current iPhone background is a photo I screen-captured from the Internet feed of the America East basketball tournament of the two BU flags next to each other for the last time. I’ll miss the days of seeing my undergraduate flag displayed at the campus I now work, or the video boards at the gym and arena misspelling Binghamton. They were always a reminder of the time I made it through the loneliness of a new adventure and realized that maybe I wasn’t done with sports – as a fan, and eventually, as a member of the media.