No Varsity, No Problem

Sports have always shaped the seasons of my life. In middle school, every change of temperature brought a new team. Fall was soccer and tennis season. Winter featured basketball, ice skating, and indoor soccer. Spring was filled with lacrosse games and more soccer. And summer had horseback riding. I used to resist the idea of youth sports specialization, instead trying everything. But by the time I got to high school, time constraints forced me to narrow the list, leaving the other activities I once loved as mere recreation.

However, the real shift came when I got to Harvard. Having forgone the recruitment process—I knew my smarts would get me further than my stick skills—I arrived on campus as a non-athletic regular person. It felt odd not to have practice five days a week or a team of people to hang out with. I longed for my varsity athletic days as I watched my friends go off to team mixers, don their new Department of Harvard Athletics crewnecks, and listened to them recount the tales of big conference wins. 

As fun as it all sounded, walking on to a team was out of the picture: I was not at the Division I level, and the 6 a.m. practices scared me from trying the novice crew program. I quickly realized, however, that my sports career did not need to end in Cambridge. In my past four years here, I’ve played three different club sports, picked up a fourth as a hobby, and stayed active in many ways.

When we’re in a new environment, we often turn to the familiar to seek comfort, and so was the case for me and my sports career at Harvard. The first club sport I joined was the Harvard Women’s Lacrosse Club, and it instantly became a new part of my personality. Every week, I looked forward to trekking across the river, being back on the field, fighting for ground balls, and scoring goals. I made some of my closest friendships on the team as we battled other schools at games and later celebrated at our own club sport mixers.  

One of my favorite memories was a game against Brown my sophomore year. I was still learning the ropes of being captain, having earned the spot at the end of my first year, but I managed to get a good turnout for our first game of the season (like other Harvard clubs, commitment was a problem). The game was tight, and we matched every goal that Brown scored, but at the end of the third quarter, we trailed by one. As my first game as captain, I could not let our team lose. I summoned up all the energy I had left to deliver a fiery team speech and implored my teammates to leave it all on the field. And leave it there, we did. We won the game by three goals.

As much as I love lacrosse, college did not kill my liberal arts-esque need to play multiple sports at once. When I realized that a club sport was nowhere near the 20-hour minimum commitment of a varsity sport, I decided to add another to my schedule. Sophomore fall, I picked up a squash racquet for the first time and joined the club team. Walking into practice with players who had a decade of experience on me was intimidating, but I quickly realized my fear was unwarranted. Although every 11-1 loss stung, the beauty of a fast-moving sport is that you can quickly move to a more skill-appropriate partner after each match. I discovered that I was not the only person new to the sport, and I made many friends who learned alongside me. Each week, I watched myself progress and proved that I could learn new things.

The sport pushed me out of my comfort zone, and a few months after starting, I got to join the team at club squash nationals in Philadelphia. While I lost both my matches as a fill-in, the tournament allowed me to get closer to the team and see how far I’d come in the sport. At practice, I no longer preface matches by discounting my skill level, and squash has become one of my favorite sports to play both at club practice and with friends.

The most unique of all my club-sport experiences was my brief foray into the world of polo. I spent many summers riding horses growing up, but as I got older, it became too logistically difficult to continue. When I got to campus, I realized that I could pick it up again—unfortunately, it took two years for me to come to this conclusion. In my junior fall, I joined the Harvard Polo Club junior varsity team and spent about six hours a week in South Hamilton. It was exhilarating to get back on the horse and play such a high-intensity sport. I had never cantered horses so fast and been surrounded by so many people while also trying to hit a ball. Polo was a combination of all of my favorite sports, and each practice left me blissfully exhausted if not awed by the natural beauty of the New England countryside.

While it’s a little harder to schedule a casual polo match than a casual squash match, I still learned many valuable lessons from the sport, most importantly, time management. I almost joined polo in my sophomore year, but backed out due to the long commute and time commitment. I talked to one of my pre-med friends on the team later that year and asked how he managed to disappear from campus for six hours twice a week without falling behind. His answer was simple: priorities. If you care enough about something, you put it on your schedule and make everything else work around it. When I took his advice that junior fall, it worked, and suddenly I was out riding horses every week and still turning psets in on time.

The final sport I’ve picked up in college is running. While I hated any distance past two miles in high school, I resolved to get better in college precisely because it was so hard for me. After two years of attempting to get into the sport, I finally got hooked when I joined a run club in my junior spring. The social pressure not to stop kept me going and launched a love of the sport. I finished my first half-marathon this past fall in Cambridge and my first full marathon in Newport, Rhode Island, in April. While running is an individual activity, my favorite moments are always with other people. I’ve loved the times when I’ve had consistent partners to do long runs with every week, and nothing tops the feeling of crossing milestone distances like 10 kilometers or 10 miles for the first time in run clubs.

Although I was never a Division I athlete, my four years at Harvard have still been filled with lots of athletic fun. Sports have not only been a way for me to stay active and make new friends, but they’ve also taught me a lot about myself. The unique goals and challenges of each sport are a way for me to prove that I can do hard things and accomplish the seemingly impossible. Both physically and mentally, sports make me stronger, and I plan to stay an athlete for the rest of my life.

Often, there is a disconnect between what we think we can accomplish and what we can actually do. A common phrase in the endurance sports world is “the mind gives out before the body does.” I hope my college athletic career illustrates that you can do anything, especially at a place with such incredible opportunities. So if you’re considering trying a new sport or adding a new club to your schedule, do it. Now is the time to take risks and prove to yourself just what you’re capable of.

Frances Connors ’26 (maryfrancesconnors@college.harvard.edu) is seeking recommendations for the next sport she should pick up.