Harvard is competitive. There are sixteen hundred students in your year, give or take, each of whom could potentially be a rival for a coveted internship, fellowship, or job. Every fall, the top five percent of students, based on last year’s GPA, are honored as John Harvard Scholars. Even the clubs are often either exclusive, locked behind a comp, or pre-professional. In such a world, there seem to be few ways to let off steam, bond with fellow students, and make connections without agendas. Enter intramural (IM) sports.
Alexander Carras, Harvard’s Recreation Programs and Club Sports Coordinator, describes the goal of IM sports as fostering “a sense of community with friendly competition as well as physical activity and mental and physical wellness.” To this end, the program provides sports ranging from football and soccer to Ultimate Frisbee and water polo, as well as organizing higher-profile, more one-off events such as the river run that happens every semester. This might lead you to believe two things: that the IM initiative is entirely athletic, and that it is being put mostly on hold during the pandemic. You would be wrong.
While its focus is on sports, the true purpose of the IM initiative is broader. Carras mentions “trying to build relationships between students and give them another outlet besides academics,” and Jerome Edwards ’21, one of currently three student Head Referees who help to lead the IM program, adds that, “It helps to create interhouse networks… where students can compete in a very low-key environment, where the competition is not the main aspect of the experience.” Casual sports does this very well, but it is not the only option, and Edwards reels off a list of current, past, and upcoming “chess events, esports events, trivia events, spelling bee events.” While he does say that, “Right now, especially, the goal in mind is to reverse to programming as it was,” he does not frame this as a battle for the soul of intramurals, but rather as a response to “the fact that a lot of the students in the program miss those events.”
The focus on providing events based on what students want is not new for intramurals. When I emailed Carras asking for an interview, he immediately asked me if I wanted to involve the Head Referees, saying that they “bring so much to the program.” He describes his own role as “really just oversight for Jerome and the other Head Ref positions… making sure that the program fits the model that the University and the athletic department has.” Much of the actual decision-making is left up to Edwards and his colleagues, who include representatives from every house. “When it’s not limited by [equipment availability], our programming is really free as long as long as we’re not going too out of the box… our rule book is ours to edit and change and apply,” Edwards explains. Even more than this, he emphasizes that, “Even us as head refs have no say in who [any] house chooses to represent them.” Houses will often have their own intramural management teams, comprising students, tutors, or both. It is with these people that the Head Referees meet when a decision must be made, and it is these people who will promote planned events to their houses and act as points of contact.
The response to the early move-out in March and the remote fall are good examples of the system in action. “In both cases,” says Edwards, “the beginning steps were just sitting down with the representatives of every house… We [Edwards and Carras] were both super surprised at the enthusiasm of all the student reps, who pushed us in the direction of keeping the Strauss Cup alive this year and maintaining the structure of the program… and then from there, with them and under the supervision of athletics, we created a bunch of programming to fit the mold.” The result was a series of events that, while not necessarily classically sporty in the “Let’s get a bunch of athletes in a stadium” sense, were approved by students as acceptable substitutes.
A few weeks ago, one such event concluded: House Mileage Week. Rather than force students across the country and the world to be online at a certain time to run, the IM team took advantage of the fundamental asynchronicity of an online semester to create a different sort of race. “We allowed the intramural representatives in every house to have access to the results,” Edwards says, with the result that “In PfoHo, we were talking about, ‘Oh, we’re third right now. We gotta beat the house that’s in second. We gotta produce more miles.’” By quickly planning new events with student input and by having people embedded in each house, the IM program was able to turn a bad situation into a community-building opportunity that went further than a traditional river run might have been able to do. Over 150 students participated, a far bigger number than river run draws in an in-person semester.
There have even been some entirely new additions to the calendar. “We’ve learned a lot about how sometimes student-organized tournaments, like the esports [contest], where everyone just reports their own games and moves in the bracket, can work very well,” says Edwards. Events which require more self-reporting and rely more on an honor system may make more of an appearance in the future. The diversification is not in terms of the definition of intramurals, but in terms of the definition of athletics: Edwards hopes to one day see Harvard have club esports or even a varsity team.
Harvard is competitive. The pandemic has not changed that, but it hasn’t changed IM sports either. They’re still student-run, still focused on promoting wellness over picking winners, and still fundamentally focused on the joy of a well-played game with or against friends. “It really just comes back to sitting down with our council,” says Carras, “and continuing to have that student voice of what should we do, how should we push this forward.” This is business as usual. Not once in my interview with him did he use the word “unprecedented.”
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) would like everyone to know that Kirkland came third in House Mileage Week.
Photo by Marissa Garcia ’21.